Gene Pang presented on Alluxio architecture and scaling performance for large deployments. He discussed Alluxio's high-level components including the master, workers, jobs masters and workers, and proxies. He then covered techniques for improving Alluxio scaling including parallelizing metadata sync and catalog sync, handling slow external storage reads asynchronously, rearranging blocks asynchronously, and adding timeouts for disk operations to avoid unexpected hangs. The goal is to make Alluxio faster, more predictable, and support higher concurrency even with interactions with slow external storage systems.