A Feature Interview with NVIDIA’s Bill Dally

The Exascale Report: On the heels of the recent FastForward program announcements, let’s take just a few steps back to frame our discussion. The FastForward program has been launched just as DARPA’s UHPC program has come to a close. Would you consider the UHPC program as being successful?

Bill Dally: I think for NVIDIA it’s been very successful. With our Echelon project, we’ve really moved the needle and made a number of very fundamental advances in technologies that are important for future HPC machines, ranging from new, low power circuit designs, to novel, very efficient energy architectures, to advances in programming languages, auto tuning, and various software development technologies. So, for us, I think there are a bunch of very tangible results that we’ve achieved under the UHPC program that are going to make a big difference in HPC in the future. One piece of evidence for that is that we’ve had 17 peer-reviewed scientific publications come out of NVIDIA’s part of the UHPC program.