HPC Luminary James Cuff Comes Out of Retirement to Join GigaIO Team
SAN DIEGO, Calif., March 29, 2022 — GigaIO, creator of next-gen data center rack-scale architecture for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High Performance Computing (HPC), today announced the hire of Dr. James Cuff as Chief of Scientific Computing and Partnerships. Dr. Cuff will be tasked with helping design composable architectures that function at scale and provide the foundation for the world’s most complex and challenging workloads. In this role, he will support and extend GigaIO’s deeply technical, sophisticated scientific computing platforms and services in order to deliver truly open, at-scale solutions for both communities and partners.
Cuff took early retirement as the Assistant Dean and Distinguished Engineer for Research Computing from Harvard University in 2017, but until now had not found a truly compelling reason to fully return to the HPC community that he so enjoys. “This is a true tipping point in our community,” said Cuff, “and it is hard to fully explain how important and game-changing these current and future architectures we will build for our community at GigaIO will turn out to be. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to properly disrupt the industry, in a good way.”
GigaIO’s highly disruptive FabreX technology transforms static infrastructure into software-defined hardware by creating pools of compute, storage, and accelerators that can be reconfigured on the fly as needed. This cloud-like agility enables scientists to build completely customized and otherwise impossible servers for their AI and HPC workflows, composing racks of servers into a single unit of compute without proprietary architecture lock-in. Making this happen requires both the ability to disaggregate and compose resources to servers, and the ability to run internode communications on the same network. GigaIO is the only vendor composing entire racks using only PCIe for the absolute lowest latency and highest bandwidth throughout.
“For years, while working at some of the largest and most complex global computational research institutes, I’ve noticed how critical the network is to the computer, but even more so to the modern computational scientist,” said Cuff. “Being able to rapidly and seamlessly create ‘impossible computer’ systems with low latency, highly performant networks and software is inordinately exciting to me, and I truly believe it will be just as exciting to our future customers and partners.”
The concept of composability is easy to describe, but excessively difficult to achieve at scale. Cuff believes the design and engineering teams at GigaIO have built that technology, and are on the path to solving the most difficult future challenges. As he puts it, “I’ve had my hands on their systems, and those systems work today. GigaIO is doing something truly disruptive, at the right scale, at the right time, and right now. I’m excited to join this vibrant and technically brilliant team, to engage with our future customers and partners, and to make a tangible difference for all of us who are part of the HPC community.”
GigaIO is equally thrilled with their latest hire. “After announcing significant contracts with two of the most prestigious science centers in the US, SDSC and TACC, we are honored to continue our laser focus on empowering scientists the world over to invent more, to cure more, and to discover more by adding Dr. James Cuff to the team,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “The fact that Dr. Cuff chose to come out of retirement to join us after an illustrious career at institutions like Harvard University, the Broad Institute, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and the European Bioinformatics Institute is testimony to the profoundly disruptive impact he expects our technology to have on the field. We are honored to welcome him as Chief of Scientific Computing and Partnerships.”
“Every system I’ve ever deployed has been the wrong shape,” bemoaned Cuff. “Unintentional bottlenecks, misplaced storage, accelerators, and chaotic I/O patterns from sophisticated algorithms continue to destroy any well-conceived initial design and specification. Configuration discrepancy and data locality have been challenges consistently throughout my entire career. With GigaIO we now have a path, and a technology to be able to build impossible configurations through composability. This company is perfectly positioned at the intersection of all modern computation, and is set to build the high-speed practical bridges we will rely upon for years to come.”
Follow Cuff’s progress with GigaIO at @DrCuff as he dedicates the next chapter of his professional life to helping GigaIO architectures function at massive scale in order to solve the world’s most complex challenging business and scientific problems.
About GigaIO
Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, GigaIO democratizes AI and HPC architectures by delivering the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). With its universal dynamic infrastructure fabric, FabreX, and its innovative open architecture using industry-standard PCI Express/soon CXL technology, GigaIO breaks the constraints of the server box, liberating resources to shorten time to results. Data centers can scale up or scale out the performance of their systems, enabling their existing investment to flex as workloads and business change over time. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit www.gigaio.com.
Source: GigaIO
