All Things Open

Join Six Feet Up at All Things Open, the technology conference bringing together the people, tools, and ideas driving open source innovation.

This year, Six Feet Up Field CTO and AWS Hero Chris Williams will share lessons from operating AI at serious scale, including a production system that processed more than 300 terabytes of audio across 500 distributed GPUs.

Scaling AI: Operational Lessons from 500 GPUs

Featured Speaker: Chris Williams, AWS Hero & Six Feet Up Field CTO

Tuesday, Oct. 20 | 3:15–3:45 p.m. ET

Running AI at scale is not just a model problem. It is an operational one.

This session draws from a large-scale language identification pipeline built with open source technologies including OpenAI Whisper, SpeechBrain, and Mozilla Common Voice. The models worked. Keeping the system reliable, reproducible, observable, and secure across hundreds of GPUs was the harder problem.

Chris will break down what failed, what kept the pipeline moving, and the engineering practices that made it possible to operate AI at scale without constant manual intervention.

What You’ll Learn:

• Control Environment Drift: Use immutable, reproducible container images across distributed workers.
• Design for Failure: Build stateless job pipelines that recover automatically when workers or jobs fail.
• Observe Model Behavior: Go beyond infrastructure metrics to monitor how AI models are actually performing.
• Continuously Validate Accuracy: Use labeled datasets and repeatable evaluation frameworks to track model quality over time.
• Build Security In: Treat security as part of distributed AI architecture from the start, not an afterthought.

If you are scaling AI beyond a prototype, this session offers practical lessons from a system that had to work across hundreds of GPUs and hundreds of terabytes of data.

About All Things Open

All Things Open is a technology conference focused on the tools, processes, and people making open source possible. The event brings together developers, technologists, decision-makers, entrepreneurs, and open source practitioners from across the industry.

The conference takes place Oct. 19–20, 2026, in downtown Raleigh, NC.