Venkatesh Petla

About Venkatesh Petla

Seasoned Software Professional with 17+ years of extensive experience on AI/ML and HPC Clusters- PyTorch- NCCL- CUDA- AI training and inference cluster setup- Rack Integration Kubernetes - Docker/Containerd image creation - gRPC based microservices - Blue/Green, Canary Deployments - Network Policies - Service Load Balancing - RBAC based pod authentication and authorization - CNI (Calico, Flannel, Celium)- Calico External Data Plane implementation - Istio Service Mesh - Helm - KustomizeCloud - OCI Infrastructure - OCI MarketPlace - OCI Object Storage - OCI IAM - OCI KMS - AWS CloudHSM - Packer - TerraformIPU/DPU Smart NICs- Cloud Networking- P4 programming- Data Plane offloading- eBPF- DPDK- Infiniband/RDMA- Firmware developmentNetworking - RoCE, RDMA - HTTP, DNS - TCP, UDP, SSL/TLS, IPv4, IPv6, IPSec - L2 Switching - DHCP, Routers, OSPF, GRE, Gateways - Subnets, VxLAN, IP-in-IP, BGP - SDN, NFV, netfilters/iptables - Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n/ac protocols - Overlay NetworksSecurity - FIPS - HSMs (Hardware Security Module)- JCE - PKI - X.509 certs management - Key management life cycle - Root of Trust - Secure Boot - PKCS11 - WebTokensHypervisors - Citrix Xen - Linux KVM - Windows Hyper-VDatabases - Oracle - MySQL - MongoDBSystem Level Programming - BIOS/UEFI - Linux kernel porting and board bringup - RT-Kernel development - Memory Management (SLAB/SLUB, NUMA, Buddy Allocation)- MMU (architecture specific Paging, Page Translation, Custom page size implementation)- CPU Scheduling - PCI drivers - Embedded Linux - Ethernet/vWLAN drivers - FileSystem/Block IO driversEmbedded Platforms - BeagleBoard, OMAP platforms, ARM11, Cortex-A9 - Raspberry-Pi-class embedded compute platforms (kernel bring-up, BSP)- Real-time test frameworks, performance validation toolsArchitecture - x86 - ARM - MIPSCavium’s - Nitrox Accelerator (Offload SSL/Crypto operations, PF/VF driver development, SR-IOV support, MSI-x support)- N3FIPS (Key Life Cycle Management, Driver development)- Liquid Security HSM (Manufacturing Process, NIST Certification, Key Life Cycle Management, Driver Development, Multi-Node cluster development, PKCS11, support)Sony’s - Cybershot (Board bringup, kernel patch porting)- Bravia (OS Development, board bringup, RT-kernel support, MMU customization)

Experience

1. Sr Principal Engineer Ai Ml and Hpc

   Dell Technologies

   Dec 2024 — Present · Austin, TX, US

   Designed and implemented Python-based rack integration software for large-scale AI server deployments, automating rack bring-up, configuration validation, and health checks across compute, networking, and storage layers. Developed Robot Framework–driven test automation integrated with Python libraries to validate host-level and rack-level use cases, including power-on validation, firmware readiness, GPU visibility, NVLink topology checks, and system health monitoring. Built and validated AI clusters with heterogeneous configurations using B200, H100, and H200 GPUs, NVIDIA Spectrum network switches, NVL72 NVLink switches, and supporting rack-scale components. Integrated NVIDIA Partner Diagnostics and automated execution of NVLink bandwidth tests, NCCL performance tests, GPU P2P bandwidth validation, and NVLink stress workloads using Python and Robot Framework pipelines. Executed and optimized MLCommons training and inference benchmarks, tuning system, networking, and GPU parameters to achieve optimal performance and stability at rack and cluster scale. Automated dataset provisioning, RAID configuration, and Slurm cluster setup, and orchestrated end-to-end MLCommons performance benchmarking workflows using Python-based tooling. Implemented RoCE and InfiniBand network validation workflows, including network readiness checks, bandwidth and latency testing, TOR switch firmware flashing, and initial configuration using Python automation. Provided hands-on customer engagement, supporting initial rack shipments and delivering on-site data-center support, including bring-up, validation, performance tuning, and issue resolution.

Education

• G.Pulla Reddy College of Engineering

  Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science and Engineering

  2003 — 2007

• Manipal University

  Master’s Degree, Computer Science

  2011 — 2013