NVIDIA Appoints Steve Scott CTO Of Tesla Business Unit

NVIDIA has just announced the addition of CTO Steve Scott to the company’s Tesla Business unit. Steve Scott was the chief architect of the Cray X1 and was involved in the design of the Cray XT, Cray XE and "Cascade" systems as well. According to his bio, Steve Scott holds 27 U.S. patents in the areas of interconnection networks, cache coherence, synchronization mechanisms and scalable parallel architectures and has also served on numerous program committees and as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He served 19 years at Cray, the last six as a senior vice president and CTO, responsible for defining Cray's technology and system architecture roadmap.

If you remember, back at the Consumer Electronics Show, NVIDIA announced its Project Denver, a custom designed SoC that will feature high-performing ARM cores and target the HPC space. In their current form, ARM processor cores are used in a vast array of devices from mobile phones, to tablets, to set to boxes. But the low-power ARM architecture hasn’t been geared for the HPC space just yet. NVIDIA aims to change that by pairing their custom core with a GPU on a single SoC, and although Steve Scott has been appointed CTO for NVIDIA's Tesla business unit which leverages the company’s current GPU technologies, it’s not that far of stretch to assume he’ll have input on Project Denver’s direction as well.

NVIDIA’s current Tesla products, which feature Fermi-based GPUs, target a wide range of computing applications, including workstations and data center solutions for large-scale installations. The product stack is set to expand in the not too distant future, however, with the addition of Kepler, which is reportedly nearing completion. According to an announcement last year, Kepler will offer 3-4x the performance per watt of Fermi. With Project Denver in development and Kepler slated to arrive in a few months, it seems Dr. Scott’s going to have some interesting toys to play with in the coming years. At the very least, his joining NVIDIA speaks volumes about his confidence in what NVIDIA has in store.

NVIDIA Taps Industry Veteran Steve Scott to Help Shape the Future of High Performance Computing

SANTA CLARA, CA -- NVIDIA today announced it plans to appoint Steve Scott, a longtime Cray Inc. executive, to help spearhead the company's high performance computing initiative.

As chief technology officer (CTO) for NVIDIA's Tesla business unit, Scott will be responsible for the Tesla roadmap and architecture. Tesla is rapidly becoming a fundamental technology in accelerated high performance computing and is expected to be the cornerstone in the race to exascale.

Scott, age 45, served 19 years at Cray, including the last six as senior vice president and CTO, with responsibility for defining Cray's technology and system architecture roadmap. He holds 27 U.S. patents in the areas of interconnection networks, processor micro architecture, cache coherence, synchronization mechanisms and scalable parallel architectures.

A noted expert in high performance computer architecture and interconnection networks, Scott was the recipient of the 2005 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award and the 2005 IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. He has served on numerous program committees and advisory boards.

"There are few people on the planet that have Steve's deep system level understanding of high performance computing," said Bill Dally, 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."

Scott received a B.S. in electrical and computing engineering, an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in computer architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Hertz Foundation Fellow.