NVIDIA lured the legendary Cisco vice president ahead of the expected rise in sales of networking solutions

Renowned inventor JP Vasseur, who worked at Cisco for 25 years, will join NVIDIA. According to CRN, the news comes shortly after NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress announced the launch of new Spectrum-X series Ethernet networking solutions, the sales of which are expected to generate billions of dollars for the company.

Wasser was once considered Cisco’s most prolific inventor. Until recently, he served as Vice President and was involved in the development of solutions and networks for machine learning and AI systems. He will now lead the development of AI solutions and network architecture at NVIDIA. Wasser said he has 32 years of combined networking experience, with the last 13 years dedicated to AI and networking products. The decision to hire a veteran with a track record of success at the intersection of AI and networking is an indication that NVIDIA will make networking a top priority.

Image source: Marten Bjork / Unsplash

NVIDIA’s Ethernet revenue, including Spectrum-X products, doubled quarter-over-quarter. The products are supported by OEM/ODM partners and implemented by cloud service providers and other companies, including X.ai, Kress said. The Spectrum-X series will in the near future allow computing clusters to scale to millions of accelerators instead of tens of thousands today, says NVIDIA.

Notably, NVIDIA recently joined the Ultra Ethernet consortium, which is essentially developing a next-generation open interconnect for HPC/AI environments that can compete with InfiniBand. The only manufacturer of InfiniBand solutions is NVIDIA, which has been promoting it for many years as the most preferred network platform for its own AI systems. However, she didn’t forget about Ethernet either.

Image source: NVIDIA

Wasser, who has worked at Cisco for the past quarter-century, was named a “chief inventor” on the company’s blog in 2019, with 483 patents covering key technologies ranging from machine learning and AI in enterprise security to the Internet of Things. As vice president, he said he led the development of LLM and specifications for generative AI use cases, tuning models and RAGs, etc. Previously, Wasser held leadership positions related to work on predictive networks, IoT, and cyber threat recognition. In addition, he chaired working groups at IEEE and IETF and had a hand in creating networking standards.

When leaving Cisco a couple of weeks ago, Wasser recalled that it was he who contributed to the birth and rapid growth of the Internet, to the development of which Cisco at one time made a significant contribution. Now, the talented inventor says he’s “incredibly excited” by NVIDIA’s prospects and is excited to join the talented team.