The Technical Steering Commitee (TSC)

The TSC is responsible for all technical oversight of the FD.io open source Project.

The TSC Members

TSC Chairperson (elected March 2022): Dave Wallace

Ed Warnicke, Distinguished Engineer - Cisco Systems

Ed Warnicke is a Distinguished Consulting Engineer in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office (CTAO) office at Cisco Systems. He has been working for over a decade in many areas of networking and Open Source. He has been a member of the OpenDaylight TSC since its inception and currently serves as a committer elected member of the OpenDaylight TSC. He is a founding TSC member at ONAP. Ed has a masters in Physics (String Theory) from Rutgers University.

John DiGiglio, Software Product Manager, Intel Corporation

John DiGiglio is a Software Product Manager within Intel’s Network and Edge Group. John has worked in the telecom industry for over 25 years. His career started with the development of microprocessor-based communications equipment while employed by AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Sound. After joining Intel, he has held a variety of marketing positions with a focus on enabling the consolidation of networking workloads on Intel® architecture. His current focus is on enabling software to support the transition to Cloud Native infrastructure as well as the application of Artificial Intelligence to network infrastructure. John holds a Bachelor of Science in E.E./C.S. from the Polytechnic Institute of NY and an MBA from Rutgers University.

Joel Halpern, Distinguished Engineer - Ericsson

Joel Halpern is a Distinguished Engineer with Ericsson. He has been involved with Router implementation, architecture, and design since the late 1980s. He has been an active member of the IETF, and has written or coauthored RFCs across a range of topics. He has significant experience with many different protocols for forwarding plane control dating back to the mid 1990s.

Lijian Zhang, Staff Software Engineer - Arm China

Lijian Zhang is a staff software engineer from Arm open source software group, where he works on networking open source projects on Arm ecosystem. He has been working on supporting FD.io projects on various aarch64 architectures since 2018. Prior to working on open source software, he developed ASIC based software for Switch and Router for more than 10 years. Lijian has a master’s degree in Mechatronics from Zhejiang University.

Dave Wallace, Technical Leader - Cisco

Dave Wallace is a software technical leader at Cisco with 30+ years of software development experience in the communications industry. He has worked on the vpp codebase since 2013 and is a contributor and committer on the VPP, CSIT, Honeycomb (archived), and ci-management projects in the FD.io community. Appointed by Damjan Marion, VPP Project Technical Lead, to represent the VPP project on the TSC.

Maciek Konstantynowicz, Distinguished Engineer - Cisco

Maciek Konstantynowicz, Distinguished Engineer at Cisco, focuses on developing Internet technologies and systems that enable deployments of distributed applications. His work areas include performance-centric design engineering, IP networking, cloud-networking, compute x86/Arm optimizations for network data planes and benchmarking. Active in IETF and LFN FD.io open-source. Technical project lead of FD.io CSIT open-source benchmarking project.

Matthew Smith, Netgate

Matthew Smith is a Software Engineer at Netgate, where he designs and implements firewall and router appliances which are based on open-source software. He has been a contributor to VPP since 2016 and a committer since 2020.

Neale Ranns, Graphiant

Neale Ranns is a data-plane software engineer at Graphiant. He has spent 20+ years in the networking world building low level router functions and data-planes. He has contributed to VPP since 2016 and been a committer since 2017.

Past members

Ray Kinsella, Platform Solutions Architect, Intel Corporation

Ray Kinsella is a Software Architect at Intel, where he has been working on the software defined data plane projects for more than 10 years. He has been interested in and working on open source technologies in various roles for more than twenty years. He has been recently most active in the FD.io community, but is a pretty constant lurker in many others. Ray holds a M.Sc. in Advanced Software Engineering from University College Dublin.

Damjan Marion, Principal Engineer - Cisco

Damjan Marion is a Principal Engineer at Cisco and is the Project Technical Leader for the FD.io VPP project.

Dave Barach, Cisco Fellow

Dave Barach is a Cisco Fellow specializing in high-speed packet processing on commodity hardware. Dave has worked on the fd.io vpp stack for more than a dozen years (and counting). Dave started programming in 1968, and has written all sorts of high performance software as well as highly scalable performance analysis tooling.

George Zhao, Director of Open Source and Ecosystem, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

George has 25 years of working experience in networking, software architecture and has been an open source evangelist for the past 4 years. He currently is director of open source and ecosystem at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. George received a bachelor in E.E. from McGill University and master’s on computer engineering from the University of Toronto.

Venky Venkatesan, In Memoriam

It is with a heavy heart that we share news that the DPDK and FD.io communities have lost a key founding member of the communities: Venky Venkatesan has passed away following a long battle with cancer. We’d like to express our utmost condolences to Venky’s family, friends, and extended community during this incredibly sad time. Venky was an extremely inspiring man who exuded greatness all around; he will be dearly missed.

Affectionately known as “The Father of DPDK,” a nod to his invention and creation of DPDK approximately ten years ago (before it was called DPDK), his footprints across the industry and the globe, are everywhere: Venky was deeply involved in the PICMG ATCA specification, creating a new bladed form factor for telecom equipment. He touched on and gave guidance to projects spanning FD.io (of which he was a sitting TSC member), Linux/netdev, DPDK, Intel

QuickAssist Technology, BSD stacks, OVS, OPNFV, all-things-virtualization (KVM, Xen, VMware, Hyper-V, etc.), ETSI, IETF, containers, and so many other arenas. Venky regularly spoke at technical conferences including Intel Developer Forum, DPDK Summit, and various other workshops spanning FD.io, NFV, SDN, and virtual switching.

Those who knew him and engaged him, especially on deep technical discussions, knew they were talking to someone with the rare combination of skills that went incredibly deep both on the hardware (silicon) side of platforms, but also on the software (networking) side of platforms. Venky was well-versed on a range of topics beyond technical themes. His mind could engage you on subjects ranging from football (soccer) to photography, to history, to politics, and many other domains. Conversations with Venky were a treat. Traveling with him was an adventure. Debating with him was a lesson. We will so miss all of him.

In addition to many friends and colleagues, Venky left behind a wife and two young daughters. A GoFundMe memorial fund to establish a college fund for his daughters has been set up to honor his legacy of mentoring and developing the next generation of engineers and scientists: https://www.gofundme.com/venky-venkatesan-memorial-fund

The DPDK release, 18.05, and the FD.io release, 18.04, were named in Venky’s honor as well.

Please join us in expressing our gratitude for all that Venky gave to the world during the too-short time he was here, as well as our deep sadness in losing a great friend, colleague, and mentor.