Nvidia Appoints Steve Scott as CTO for Its Tesla Business Unit

Nvidia has just announced that it has appointed Steve Scott, a longtime executive for supercomputer specialist Cray, as CTO for the company's Tesla business unit, in order to spearhead its high performance computing initiative.

In his role as chief technology officer (CTO) for the Nvidia Tesla unit, Scott will be responsible with establishing the Tesla roadmap and architecture expectations.

Before starting his work at Nvidia, Scott 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.

Scott is also regarded as a valuable expert in high performance computer architecture and interconnection networks, as he was the recipient of the 2005 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award and the 2005 IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award.

In addition, he also 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," concluded the company's rep.

Nvidia put a lot of effort in developing its Tesla business in hopes that general purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPUs) will become a fundamental technology for HPC systems.

The Santa Clara-based company even goes to the extent of saying that GPGPU will become the cornerstone in the race to exascale computing.

Currently, Tesla accelerators, combined with Intel Xeon processors, power the world's second fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.