Old is New Again: Bandwidth will be the AI bottleneck
AI doesn't just chew up compute—it eats your network for breakfast. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora dig into the pressing issues surrounding AI workloads and networking. Everyone's worried about GPUs and cooling, but nobody’s talking about the lateral east-west traffic explosion, the rise of inter-agent comms, or the operational strain on DCN fabric and interconnects. Our experts discuss the importance of upgrading data center networks to accommodate AI demands, examining the differences between training and inferencing workloads. The conversation also covers the necessity of high-performance networking, the relevance of latency, data gravity, and the potential expansion of data centers. Tune in to get valuable insights into the challenges and solutions shaping the future of AI-driven applications.
Creators and Guests
Host
Joel Moses
Distinguished Engineer and VP, Strategic Engineer at F5, Joel has over 30 years of industry experience in cybersecurity and networking fields. He holds several US patents related to encryption technique.
Host
Lori MacVittie
Distinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist at F5, Lori has more than 25 years of industry experience spanning application development, IT architecture, and network and systems' operation. She co-authored the CADD profile for ANSI NCITS 320-1998 and is a prolific author with books spanning security, cloud, and enterprise architecture.
Guest
Ken Arora
Ken Arora is a Distinguished Engineer in F5’s Office of the CTO, focusing on addressing real-world customer needs across a variety of cybersecurity solutions domains, from application to API to network. Some of the technologies Ken champions at F5 are the intelligent ingestion and analysis of data for identification and mitigation of advanced threats, the targeted use of hardware-acceleration to deliver solutions at higher efficacy and lower cost, and the design of user experiences based on intent and workflows. Ken is also a thought leader in the evolution of the zero trust mindset for security, and how that will be applied to increasingly distributed and even edge-native apps and services. Prior to F5, Mr. Arora co-founded a company that developed a solution for ASIC-accelerated pattern matching, which was then acquired by Cisco, where he was the technical architect for the Cisco ASA Product Family. In his more distant past, he was also the architect for several Intel microprocessors. His undergraduate degrees are in Astrophysics and Electrical Engineering, from Rice University.
