The circle is closed: Lisa Spelman, who was responsible for Xeon, left Intel and headed Cornelis Networks, which separated from Intel.

Network solutions provider Cornelis Networks announced the appointment of Lisa Spelman (pictured below) as CEO, effective August 15. She will succeed Philip Murphy, who will serve as President and Chief Operating Officer. Spelman joins Cornelis Networks from Intel, where she held leadership positions for more than two decades.

Most recently, Spelman was corporate vice president of the DCAI Group (Data Center and AI) and general manager of Xeon Products and Solutions. She also held a number of leadership positions in other Intel divisions. Murphy said Spelman has an unparalleled breadth and depth of knowledge in all aspects of building and scaling successful businesses. The company’s clients already know Spelman and trust her ability to help them build the next generation of infrastructure they need, he said.

Image source: Cornelis Networks

The Omni-Path interconnect, which was abandoned by Intel at one time and which eventually went to Cornelis Networks, is used by scientific, academic, government and commercial organizations around the world. However, in the latest TOP500 rating, the share of systems with this interconnect is only 6.4%, and Cornelis solutions account for less than 1%. The company is now preparing to begin shipping its next generation CN5000 solutions, designed specifically for AI and HPC environments to meet growing demands for network infrastructure scalability.

Spelman noted that one of the biggest challenges companies face when developing AI infrastructure is having a high-performance interconnect between CPUs, GPUs and accelerators: “The ability to combine these resources in a highly efficient way impacts an organization’s competitiveness in the world of AI.”