Nvidia Hands Tesla Reins to Supercomputing Bigwig

Posted 08/11/2011 at 7:35am | by Paul Lilly

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Steve Scott is an accomplished man. For the past 19 years, Scott's been working at Cray, where he served as vice president and CTO for the past 6 years. Prior to that, he was the chief architect of the Cray X1 scalable vector supercomputer and helped design several other Cray systems, including the XT, XE, and "Cascade" systems. Scott holds 27 U.S. patents in a variety of geeky areas (cache coherences and scalable parallel architectures to name just two), and is now bringing all that brain power to Nvidia.

Nvidia appointed the 45-year-old former CTO of Cray as CTO for its Tesla business unit. Going forward, Scott will be responsible for Tesla's roadmap and architecture as it applies to high performance computing (HPC).

"There are few people on the planet thath ave Steve's deep system level understanding of high performance computing," said Bill Daily, Nvidia's chief scientist. "Steve's decision to join Nvidia is a resounding endorsement that GPU accelerated computing is the future of HPC. He will play a central role in architecting the world's most powerful supercomputers."

This is a big hire for Nvidia as it tries to promote GPUs in supercomputers. Nvidia's GPUs are used in China's Tianhe 1A, the second fastest supercomputer on the planet according to Top500, and are key to the chip maker's plans to make exascale supercomputing a reality by 2018.

Iamge Credit: Nvidia