April 2 — The HPC industry has lost one of its gifted leaders. It saddens us to report that Bill Blake passed away on March 31 after suffering from a heart attack. While many of you will remember Bill from his work as CTO of Cray, Mr. Blake was most recently Executive Vice President of R&D at D-Wave Systems.
Bill was a technology leader in the high performance computing industry for three decades. Prior to D-Wave, Bill was CTO of Cray Inc., responsible for defining Cray’s next generation of supercomputers and solutions including major initiatives in exascale computing and the fusion of supercomputing and large-scale data analytics. He also served on Cray’s Board of Directors from June 2006 to June 2012 where he chaired the Technology Strategy Advisory Committee helping Cray with long-term strategic directions, including expanding into large-scale data analytics.
Until January 2011, Bill was General Manager of Parallel Computing Platforms in Microsoft’s Technical Computing group. He was previously President and CEO of Interactive Supercomputing Inc., an M.I.T. spin-off company that developed and sold an interactive parallel computing platform that extended existing desktop simulation tools for parallel computing on a spectrum of computing architectures, and was acquired by Microsoft in 2009. Prior to his work at Interactive Supercomputing Inc., he served as Senior Vice President of Product Development at Netezza Corporation, as part of the start-up team that developed parallel FPGA accelerated database systems, and created the data warehouse appliance market. Netezza was acquired by IBM in 2010.
Bill also held key management positions with Digital Equipment Corporation, and Compaq Computer Corporation, in compiler and parallel software development. In his role as Vice President, he proposed and managed the market leading High Performance Technical Computing group, ultimately driving a $1.2B business that delivered many of the largest systems in the world based on the Alpha chip.
Bill held a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and was a member of IEEE and ACM. He is a former member of the board of directors of TotalView Technologies, Inc., Terascala, Inc., Cluster File Systems, Inc., Unlimited Scale, Inc., and a member of external advisory boards at Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Boston CommonAngels, investors in early-stage high tech companies.
—
Source: D-Wave Systems