Prior to Calxeda, Gopal was part of management team for Cisco’s highly successful Unified Computing Server (UCS) product line. He was an early member of UCS development team and drove all of UCS platform engineering delivering three generations of UCS platforms that helped grow UCS product line to a multibillion-dollar business for Cisco. Prior to Cisco, Gopal led architecture and planning for server platform networking, storage and chipset products at Intel. His team drove major initiatives such as integration of PCIe into Xeon, drove definition, implementation and IEEE standardization of converged and enhanced Ethernet (CEE), development and standardization of Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and PCIe SR-IOV and delivery of these capabilities in Intel’s NIC, storage and chipset products. He joined Intel through Intel’s acquisition of Level One. Prior to Level One Communications, Gopal held management positions in multiple startups including MiLAN technology (acquired by Digi International) and Acclaim communications (acquired by Level One).

HPCwire: Hi Gopal, this was a break-out year for Marvell ThunderX Arm processors in HPC – numerous systems partners, several large deployments, and the arrival of petascale Arm. To what do you attribute this success?

Gopal Hegde: Our success is attributable to FOUR main elements: (1) Customers (2) Team (3) Product and (4) Partners. Let me elaborate.

With ThunderX2, we have demonstrated that Arm based servers can be deployed for production workloads at scale into market segments that benefit from an optimized SOC architecture. We have also established a broad ecosystem that makes this seamless for our customers. We are now building on that experience with a very compelling roadmap that will further highlight our team’s ability to innovate and execute advanced processor designs that drive key application performance advantages for HPC applications. We continue to partner with Arm to bring advanced Arm technology to market while also working with key industry partners and customers to accelerate delivery of our products and. Our recent announcement with Los Alamos National Laboratory is an example of such partnership. The acquisition of Cavium by Marvell, which closed in July of 2018, has been outstanding for our server team. We are now part of a larger organization where we can leverage greater internal resources while also benefiting from a more significant field organization and established market presence in related and adjacent markets.