Thao Nguyen

Thao Nguyen Founder & CEO TORMEM INC.

Thao Nguyen, CEO and Founder of TORmem Inc., has a wealth of experience in hardware design, product development, manufacturing operations, and supply chain management. He is a well recognized professional known for building innovative hardware for the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, USA, EU and Asia. Thao’s expertise in building hardware over the past 35 years includes compute servers, storage servers and NetApp appliances. As VP Hardware Engineering, Distinguished Hardware Engineer at Equinix-Packet Host and Principal Technical Staff Hardware Engineer at Facebook, Thao was a pioneer in global operations manufacturing and quality engineering. He built and deployed millions of OCP servers for Facebook data centers worldwide and was a founding team member and Director of Open Compute Compliance and Interoperability at Facebook. Thao served as a Technical Staff member in the Compute and Storage Engineering division at NetApp. Beginning in 1985, Thao was involved in product development and product engineering of VLSI Applications and Logic Design at IBM. Thao started career with BSEE University of Missouri Rolla and MSEE Syracuse University.

Who is TORmem?

Our Mission
TORmem was founded with one clear goal in mind: to bring innovative disaggregated memory technologies to market that will enable new applications, new computing system designs, and vastly improved cost efficiency and performance for customers from enterprise to hyperscale.

One Memory for All represents this vision through our commitment to changing the landscape of our industry by bringing about In Memory Computing (IMC) and supercomputer-like performance for the mass market, where many servers can centralize their memory needs in a single appliance.

Solving Real Problems
Today, many applications are limited by their ability to access fast memory. For real-time processing, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML), the ideal type of memory is Random Access Memory (RAM). However, an individual server in the data center can only support so much RAM, as it is installed locally in each server and cannot be shared between servers. If servers do not have enough RAM, their performance is limited, and if they have too much, significant portions of that RAM may go wastefully unused.

TORmem’s innovative approach is to create disaggregated memory appliances which contain vast amounts of RAM, which are connected to the servers in a rack using very high-speed interconnection technologies. These technologies, such as Peripheral Component Interconnect Express Generation 5.0 (PCIe 5.0) and Compute Express Link (CXL), are significantly faster than Ethernet or other more traditional technologies used to interconnect servers, allowing the memory within the TORmem appliance to be used by each server almost as if that same RAM was installed locally within each server.

The end result is a solution for disaggregated, high-speed memory at data center scale, which enables new applications, accelerates existing ones and allows for lower individual server cost.


Technologies and Products
Creating these products requires the development of new technologies to provide the speed, resilience and scalability that are needed. TORmem uses a balanced combination of leading-edge industry standards and custom development to meet these needs, with innovation in high-speed interconnects, memory controller design, and resource allocation.