After narrowly escaping delisting from NASDAQ and battling a pending class-action lawsuit, Cray Inc. has just run into another major obstacle. HPCwire confirmed late last week that the company's CTO, Steve Scott, has resigned after more than 13 years.
Scott, heralded earlier this year as one of HPCwire's People to Watch for 2005, was instrumental in creating Cray's T3E system, as well as the X1, the company's “comeback” product. At the time of his exit, Scott reportedly was designing the integrated infrastructure for Cray's next-generation supercomputer.
Though the decision was not easy, Scott says he has been contemplating it for some time now, and that his decision is not as abrupt as it may appear.
“I've been thinking about it for a while now and talking to my management about a good time to transition,” Scott said. “While working at Cray has been tremendously rewarding for me, I'd like some additional experiences during my career.”
In the summers of 1990 and 1991, Scott worked as a Cray intern writing simulators and doing architectural studies on aspects of proposed systems, such as memory architectures and I/O subsystems. In 1992, Scott joined Cray, then Cray Research, and began his long tenure there, which lasted over a decade.
“It's been a fantastic place to work: great people, great products, great opportunities to contribute,” said Scott. “With a spate of successful product introductions in the past year, and our road map firmly in place for the future, I felt it was a good time to move on and try something new,” he continued.
Scott has no current plans to go anywhere else, except maybe home. He said his travel schedule has been so intense the past couple of years that his current plan is just to spend “some much needed time” with his family. “We'll see what happens after that,” he stated.
Though Scott was an influential and skilled member of the company, he doesn't feel that his departure will deter Cray from success. “There are lots of very strong technical people at Cray, and they have an excellent set of current and future products. I'm confident they'll do just fine without me,” he said.
Some analysts agree that Scott's departure will not ultimately harm Cray. Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research, said, “I imagine it'll be a blow to Cray's sadly diminished image, but I don't see it as fatal. The company's latest efforts have [been] shifting more toward clustered Opteron installations, which is a significantly different place/destination than HPC offered a decade ago.”
Others think Scott's resignation could have an adverse effect on the company. Stacey Quandt, of Quandt Analytics, said, “He cultivated a good reputation, and he was instrumental in helping Cray develop new products in the high-performance technical computing markets. His shoes will be hard to fill and the uncertainty regarding a replacement will affect Cray.”
Despite the mixed reactions, Cray president Peter Ungaro, though sad to see Scott leave, does not seem worried: “Steve Scott is one of the most respected and top notch technical leaders in the high performance computing industry,” he said. “It will be very difficult to fill his shoes, and we're truly going to miss Steve. However, designing supercomputers is a team effort, and we've got the strongest team in the HPC industry.”
To learn a bit more about Steve Scott, visit http://www.taborcommunications.com/hpcwire/features/people05/index.html#scott