Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Clockwork.io
As the worlds of AI workloads and SRE practices converge, more and more teams are expected to ramp up on a whole new vocabulary. Terms like "NCCL", "PXN", "MoE" and "queue pairs" are thrown around, yet these concepts can remain elusive, buried in dense academic papers or scattered vendor documentation.
Inspired by Edward Gorey's whimsical illustrated alphabets, this talk provides a structured, approachable tour through essential AI networking concepts. We'll demystify the specialized terminology and building blocks of AI networking, explaining each concept in clear language with practical context and a touch of darkly playful illustration to help the concepts stick.
Lerna is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Clockwork Systems where she helps customers meet their performance goals with software solutions built on Clockwork.io’s foundational research. Prior to this, she was a Senior Solutions Architect serving Global Financial Services customers at AWS for 3 years. Before that, Lerna spent 17 years as an infrastructure engineer in large financial services companies working on authentication systems, distributed caching, and multi region deployments using IaC and CI/CD to name a few. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, sightseeing and backyard astronomy.
author = {Lerna Ekmekcioglu},
title = {The Gashlycrumb Tinies of {AI} Networking You Must Know (or {Languish!})},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
