# CTO Interview: Kunle Olukotun of SambaNova

- Show: [EE Times Current](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current)
- Published: 2021-10-29
- Length: 39m
- Page: https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova
- Listen: https://www.eetimes.com/podcasts/wb-ep159/

## Summary

Kunle Olukotun, chief technologist at SambaNova, explains the company's dataflow architecture designed to overcome the memory and bandwidth limitations of traditional GPU-based AI systems. He details how SambaNova's hardware and Sofware stack, SambaFlow, enable efficient simultaneous training and inference, allowing for dynamic model adaptation and the handling of massive embedding tables. Olukotun also introduces the concept of 'dataflow threads' to bridge the gap between regular dense matrix operations and irregular sparse computations, addressing the unsustainable growth rate of model parameters.

## Chapters

- [0:00](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=0) Introduction and SambaNova Overview
- [5:45](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=345) Data Center AI and Memory Constraints
- [13:45](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=825) Unified Training and Inference Platform
- [19:05](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=1145) SambaFlow Software and Dataflow Graphs
- [26:02](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=1562) Pipelining and High-Performance Computing
- [29:56](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/ee-times-current/2021-10-29-cto-interview-kunle-olukotun-of-sambanova#t=1796) Dataflow Threads and Irregular Applications

## Topics

- [AI & machine learning](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/ai-and-machine-learning)
- [Microcontrollers & dev platforms](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/microcontrollers-and-platforms)

## Most relevant to

companies scaling up

## Mentioned

- SambaNova (company)
- Kunle Olukotun (other)
- SambaFlow (product)
- PyTorch (tool)
- TensorFlow (tool)
- CUDA (tool)
- Google TPU (product)
- Argonne National Lab (company)
- NVIDIA (company)

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## Citing this page

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