Programming In The Parallel Universe

This week is the eighth annual International Workshop on OpenCL, SYCL, Vulkan, and SPIR-V, and the event is available online for the very first time in its history thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the event organizers, and the conference chair, is Simon McIntosh-Smith, who is a professor of high performance computing at Bristol University in Great Britain and also the head of its Microelectronics Group. Among other things, McIntosh-Smith was a microprocessor architect at STMicroeletronics, where he designed SIMD units for the dual-core, superscalar Chameleon and SH5 set-top box ASICs back in the late 1990s. McIntosh-Smith moved to Pixelfusion in 1999, which created the first general purpose GPU – arguably eight or nine years before Nvidia did it with its Tesla GPUs, where he was an architect on the 1,536-core chip and software manager for two years. In 2002, McIntosh-Smith was one of the co-founders of ClearSpeed, which created floating point math accelerators used in HPC systems before GPU accelerators came along, and was first director of architecture and applications and then vice president of applications.