In news disclosed via tweet, Microsoft Azure Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute Evan Burness disclosed that Steve Scott, long-time industry luminary and senior manager at Cray, is leaving HPE for Microsoft to become technical fellow and corporate vice president of hardware architecture.
Steve Scott,
Mostly at Cray off and on for nearly 30 years – along with SGI, Nvidia and Google – Scott most recently was senior fellow, senior vice president and chief technology officer for HPC & AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which announced its acquisition of Cray in May 2019. He officially took on his role at HPE when the acquisition was completed last September.
The news comes in the wake of Microsoft’s announcement less than a month ago at its annual Build conference of what the company said is the world’s fifth most powerful supercomputer – with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits/second of network connectivity for each GPU server in the cluster. The system, hosted on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, was built with and for OpenAI, an AI research lab. The system is designed for training larger AI models targeting highly complex workloads.
Scott began his career with four years as a senior architecture engineer at Cray Research before three-plus years as principal engineer and chief engineer at Silicon Graphics (SGI was acquired by HPE in 2016). He returned to Cray for 11 years, culminating in the role of senior vice president and CTO, before shorter stints as SVP and CTO, Tesla Business Unit at Nvidia and as principal engineer at Google’s Platform Group. He then returned for Cray SVP and CTO before taking on his last role at HPE after the Cray acquisition.
Cray itself is a leading player in the global race to exascale, with its Shasta architecture to be used in the Aurora (Argonne National Labs), El Capitan (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Frontier (Oak Ridge National Labs) exascale systems scheduled for delivery next year and in 2023.
