Keynote Speaker: Ali Heydari, Distinguished Data Center Technologist, Nvidia

Abstract: Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications are about to permanently change design of data centers where liquid will be coming closer than ever as the common medium to cool the core of computational servers from GPU, CPU, Switch, and other components. Hybrid air and liquid cooling with direct to chip cooling design is going to be the low hanging fruit of choice for designers where liquid will be used to directly cool high heat density components while air will continue to cool other components. Design of Liquid plumbing, selection of cooling distribution units, selection of compatible wetted materials list and reliability/serviceability issues are some of the challenges that industry is striving to resolve as we see more data centers preparing to embrace liquid for cooling servers and other IT equipment. Utilizing CFD, FNM and Omniverse tools to create digital twins of high heat density data centers to address many challenges of high heat density data centers in the age of AI is presented.

Ali Heydari is Distinguished engineer and Data Center Technologist at Nvidia in charge of all data center cooling technology development at Nvidia. In this role, he is developing direct to chip liquid cooling technologies using cold plates, cooling distribution units and manifolds for cooling of Nvidia's high heat density data centers. Prior to Nvidia, he worked as senior director in charge of Rigetti’s Quantum Computers using the most futuristic technology in today’s data center compute. Accomplishments include, setting up the first Quantum Cloud Services enabling over the cloud access of the Quantum Computers. Prior to that he served as Senior Technical Director and Chief Data Center Architect at Baidu, the largest search engine and AI company in China. In this role, he was server and data center architect in charge of hardware and data center design, development and deployment in China’s largest data center search and AI company.

Formerly, he was Senior Hardware Engineer at Twitter where he was responsible for grounds up development of Twitter's data center ODM server development. Earlier, he was Senior Hardware Engineer at Facebook where he helped in developing Facebook’s original OCP server and data center products. Prior to that he worked at Sun Microsystems and spend about 10 years as Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana, M.S., Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and M.A. in applied mathematics from University of California, Berkeley. He has over 25 issued patents in data center cooling technologies.