On August 12, long-time Cray CTO, Steve Scott will move on from the supercomputer maker for destinations unknown. According to an SEC filing from August 1, he would be “taking a senior position at a technology partner of the company” which, while still cryptic, narrows the list down to some extent.
The likely candidates who might receive Scott with open arms include government partners like DARPA but could also be vendor partners AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA among others.
At the moment, Cray execs are mum about the departure, noting in an interview today that they are “in the process of finding a replacement for his position…and will take time to find the right candidate that can successfully lead out long-term technical direction.”
This marks a tough loss for Cray; Scott moved directly from his PhD research at the University of Wisconsin in 1992 to Cray Research and was one of the lead minds behind the T3E processor and GigaRing Interconnect that was a Cray super stable last century. More to the point, Scott led the Cascade project behind the Aries interconnect, serving an important role in the future of Cray’s supercomputer lines.
Some are already speculating that his replacement could be ex-IBMer, Margaret Williams who started with Cray in 2005 as the senior vice president of engineering. This would seem like a logical guess since Williams used to oversee Big Blue’s AIX and parallel computing software development and database software development. Her career also includes a stint running the IBM team at Maui HPC Center in Hawaii.