Simon McIntosh-Smith

Simon McIntosh-Smith received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Cardiff in 1991, graduating as valedictorian.  He then began his career as a microprocessor architect at Inmos and STMicroelectronics, before co-designing the world's first fully programmable GPU at Pixelfusion in 1999. In 2002 he co-founded ClearSpeed Technology where, as Director of Architecture and Applications, he co-developed the first modern many-core HPC accelerators. In 2003 he led the development of the first accelerated BLAS/LAPACK and FFT libraries. This in turn gave rise to the first modern accelerated Top500 system, TSUBAME 1.0 at Tokyo Tech in 2006. He now leads the Microelectronics Research Group at the University of Bristol, UK. He was a member of the project group that led the procurement of Archer, the new UK national supercomputer. In 2013 he was a joint recipient of an R&D 100 award for his contribution to the Mantevo benchmark suite being led by Sandia National Laboratory. In 2014 he was awarded the first Intel Parallel Computing Center in the UK, only the seventh such center in the world. McIntosh-Smith sits on the Khronos industry standards body where he actively contributes to the OpenCL heterogeneous many-core programming standard. He is a member of the EU-funded FP7 Mont Blanc Exascale project, and the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI), sits on PRACE funding panels, chairs the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL), and sits on the program committees for SC, ISC and HiPEAC.