Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.

SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA

AI Engineer and PhD Candidate

Independent

Babar Khan is a software-hardware engineer holding B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering and currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in distributed storage and hardware accelerators (FPGAs, ASICs, and GPUs). Since 2024, he has been working as an AI engineer at a stealth startup, focusing on leveraging AI chips for language models. Previously, he has worked at Intel Germany, SAP Germany, and spent four years as a broadcast TV engineer at a leading media company. Babar actively contributes to open-source software and hardware projects and occasionally answers questions on Stack Overflow. He is multilingual, fluent in five languages.

Related Sessions

Data Architecture / Storage Architecture

Are we Chasing a Mirage with SMR Disks?

Research on Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks began around 2008, with the first ever consumer-grade SMR (Drive Managed SMR) disk released in 2013, followed by HM-SMR (Host Managed SMR) disk in 2014 and HA-SMR (Host Aware SMR) disk in 2016. This talk reflects on 18 years of SMR evolution —covering physical layouts, filesystems, garbage collection algorithms, device drivers, and simulators. Furthermore, the talk will also discuss how SMR disks integrated with data storage solutions like RAID and deduplication, including real-world use cases of SMR disks by hyperscalers. Given this perspective, we will ask: are we really chasing a mirage with SMR disks when it comes to AI workloads? With the much-anticipated arrival of the first consumer-grade Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) disk—and more expected in the coming years—this talk will explore how lessons learned from the past 18 years of SMR technology can help pave a smoother transition to HAMR drives, particularly for AI workloads.

Babar Khan
AI Engineer and PhD Candidate
Independent
0

Follow us on X

SDC 2025 is brought to you by SNIA. SNIA is an industry association committed to its mission of worldwide leadership developing and promoting architectures, standards, education and vendor-neutral collaboration.