Andrew Putnam

Partner General Manager, Cloud and AI Hardware Engineering, Microsoft

Keynote Title

From Prototype to Planet-Scale: A Decade of Acceleration at Hyperscale

Abstract

Over the past decade, accelerators – especially GPUs – have become central to hyperscale computing. Yet making individual kernels faster does not automatically make large, multi-tenant systems faster.

Drawing on more than ten years of running FPGAs continuously in production at Microsoft, this keynote reflects on what it actually takes to accelerate real cloud systems at global scale.

Looking forward, GPUs are indispensable – but not sufficient on their own. The next phase of hyperscale performance will depend on heterogeneous, data-centric hardware–software co-design and on engineering systems that can evolve in production for a decade or more.

Bio

Andrew Putnam is a Partner General Manager for Cloud and AI Hardware Engineering at Microsoft, where he leads programmable accelerator development across Azure’s hyperscale infrastructure.

He is the co-founder of Project Catapult and served as the architect and engineering leader for Azure Accelerated Networking (Azure Boost), enabling more than a 10× increase in production network bandwidth.