Scott Aylor
Corporate Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Solutions
AMD

Scott Aylor is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Solutions at AMD. Scott is responsible for driving strategy and execution across the AMD Server and Embedded segments. Scott originally joined AMD to run its Embedded Solutions division in 2013 and has been responsible for driving design win and share growth in embedded vertical markets.

Prior to AMD, Scott was at Freescale Semiconductor for 17 years with deep domain knowledge and experience in the industrial, automotive, networking and general embedded markets. Scott came to AMD with technical insight, customer relationships, and a track record of successfully growing embedded businesses. He held many leadership positions with Freescale including Vice President of Product Development for the Digital Networking Group, General Manager for the Wireless Access Division, and Director of Engineering for the Microcontroller Solutions Group.

Scott holds an MBA in Management from St. Edwards University and a MS & BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech University. Scott is based in Austin, Texas.

HPCwire: 2017 seemed to be about product – bringing out a rather large portfolio of price-performant CPUs (EPYC line) to attract systems builders and hyperscalers. What should the HPC community expect from AMD in 2018? Will the emphasis shift from product introduction to deployment? 

Scott Aylor: We entered large-scale deployment mode with EPYC in the last quarter of 2017, with Microsoft Azure and Baidu announcing availability of AMD EPYC in their datacenters. We also have announced major new OEM platforms from HPE and Dell EMC that put EPYC right in the heart of the high-volume one-socket and two-socket server market. At launch Dell specifically talked about improvements they are seeing in fluid dynamics benchmarks with EPYC, so we are targeting the HPC community with EPYC, too. The Radeon Instinct family of GPUs is the second part of the story, giving us a powerful GPU Compute engine to work in tandem with EPYC. As the only provider with both high-performance x86 and discrete GPU processors, I think we are in a solid position with the HPC Community entering the year.

HPCwire: What is AMD’s vision and strategy for achieving exascale? What are AMD’s aspirations with regard to returning to the Top500.

The AMD exascale strategy to re-enter supercomputing is built around leveraging our leadership technologies in CPU, GPU, memory, interconnect and open standards to build large scale systems. AMD’s multi-generational approach to strengthen core performance, core scaling and integration will build on the “Zen” x86 core foundation and continue to drive higher levels of performance and scale. AMD’s Radeon Pro / Instinct product families will continue to strengthen, building on the success of the Vega architecture to offer higher degrees of GPU compute density for Exascale systems.  AMD is uniquely positioned to bring these two technologies together to build the heterogeneous systems needed the meet the exascale supercomputing needs of the future.

HPCwire: What do you hope to see from the HPC community in the coming year?

The short answer is ‘fast adoption of AMD EPYC processors’ in their systems, but seriously, I think having AMD back in high-performance computing offers the HPC community a great opportunity. EPYC is truly a differentiated product from anything else out there: the I/O, the memory support, the number of cores is unique in the CPU market. We want the HPC community to explore its full potential and build the libraries and the software that can leverage EPYC. Add in the Radeon Instinct GPU Compute capability and AMD is an excellent choice. I hope that we get the opportunity to be part of the HPC conversation in a much more substantive way going forward. Our next product, “Rome” is scheduled for first samples this year and then “Milan” after that. EPYC is just the beginning and AMD is fully committed to being part of HPC for the long run.

HPCwire: Outside of the professional sphere, what can you tell us about yourself – personal life, family, background, hobbies, etc.? Is there anything about you your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

I am a former Texas Tech Red Raider Football Letterman and I’m active in the alumni programs supporting Red Raider athletics. I’m also an avid mountain biker and can be found most weekends in the backwoods of the Austin hill country.

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Earl Joseph Hyperion	Frederick Kohout Cray	Ian Colle Amazon
Jysoo Lee KAUST	Marc Hamilton NVIDIA	Ralph McEldowney DoD
Rick Stevens ANL	Scott Aylor AMD	Trish Damkroger Intel