Nvidia Signs On Cray Exec As New Tesla CTO

Cray Inc. executive Steve Scott will be joining Nvidia's Tesla business unit as CTO.

Wednesday Nvidia said that longtime Cray Inc. executive Steve Scott will be signing on as chief technology officer (CTO) for Nvidia's Tesla business unit. According to the company, Scott will be responsible for the overall Tesla roadmap and architecture.

"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."

The 45-year-old ex-Cray executive spent the last six years of his nineteen-year tenure as Cray Inc.'s senior vice president and CTO, and was responsible for defining the supercomputer company's technology and system architecture roadmap. He also currently holds 27 U.S. patents in the areas of interconnection networks, processor micro architecture, cache coherence, synchronization mechanisms and scalable parallel architectures... AKA a big win for Nvidia's patent portfolio.

In addition to his achievements at Cray Inc., Scott was the recipient of the 2005 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award and the 2005 IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award.

Wednesday Nvidia did not indicate exactly when Scott will take the Tesla CTO throne. "Tesla is rapidly becoming a fundamental technology in accelerated high performance computing and is expected to be the cornerstone in the race to exascale," the company said in a press release.