Nvidia Corp. said recently it would appoint Steve Scott, a longtime Cray executive, to the position of chief technology officer of Tesla business unit to help spearhead the company's high-performance computing (HPC) initiative. The appointment underlines the importance of Tesla products and HPC technologies in general.

As chief technology officer (CTO) for Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, Steve 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 supercomputers towards the end of the decade.

Mr. 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.

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

It is remarkable that starting both Mr. Dally and Mr. Scott will define Nvidia’s graphics processors roadmap, but neither of them are graphics specialists. William Dally has specialized in parallel computing, whereas Steve Scott has specialized on development of HPC system architectures. Given Mr. Scott’s specialization, it is clear that he will be one of the key specialists in development of Echelon supercomputing project that Nvidia is developing with DARPA.

Tags: Nvidia, Tesla, Echelon, Kepler, Maxwell, SGI, GPGPU