Technologists

Ray McConnell

Chief Technical Officer

Ray has over 20 years experience in building and delivering parallel processing systems. These have ranged from large multi-board systems (300,000 processors) and smaller desk-side units (400 processors) through to large 70M+ transistor processor SoC designs.

Ray also has extensive experience of over 12 years in high-energy startup companies. Having served as a board member in two companies and managed engineering teams of up to 70 engineers. Through this experience, Ray has gone through the process of startup to IPO, and from founder to management buy out.

John Gustafson

Chief Technology Officer, HPC

John joined ClearSpeed in 2005 after leading high-performance computing efforts at Sun Microsystems. He has 33 years experience using and designing compute-intensive systems, including the first matrix algebra accelerator and the first commercial massively-parallel cluster while at Floating Point Systems. His pioneering work on a 1024-processor nCUBE at Sandia National Laboratories created a watershed in parallel computing, for which he received the inaugural Gordon Bell Award. He also has received three R&D 100 Awards for innovative performance models, including the model commonly known as Gustafson's Law or Scaled Speedup.

He received his B.S. degree from Caltech and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Iowa State University, all in Applied Mathematics.

Simon McIntosh-Smith

Vice President of Customer Applications

Simon McIntosh-Smith has been designing microprocessors and parallel applications for over 15 years. He started his career at Inmos and ST Microelectronics, before moving to PixelFusion in 1999, and becoming a founding member of ClearSpeed in 2001. As vice president of customer applications, Simon leads the customer-facing development of ClearSpeed's application accelerators for pervasive high-performance, high-density computing and is responsible for the field application engineering group. He graduated as Valedictorian with a first class degree in Computer Science, for which he was awarded Cardiff University's Cray Research prize in 1991.

Russell David

Vice President of Engineering

Russel David joined ClearSpeed in 1998 and is responsible for the development and delivery of the company's hardware and software including silicon and board products and the development tools and application software. Prior to joining the company, he worked for Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, leading a team of engineers responsible for the design of mixed-signal baseband Integrated Circuits for the wireless communications market. Additionally his extensive semiconductor background includes design and management positions at GPS (in both telecommunications and DSP Cores), Eurotherm and Standard Telecommunications Laboratories.

Ann Johnson

Vice President of Strategic Partnerships

Ann Johnson joined ClearSpeed in June 2006 as director of Solutions, Applications and Support, and was promoted to vice president of Strategic Partnerships in November of 2007. She has over 22 years experience in software and application design and development within the graphics and high performance computing industries. Starting her career at TRW and Northrop Grumman specializing in aerospace application development, she then moved on to an extensive career at Silicon Graphics (SGI) where she led the global applications, benchmark, and performance engineering teams. She now leads ClearSpeed’s business and technical relationships with OEMs, ISVs and other technology partners including application and solution engineering

In 2004, she received a YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry award recognizing Silicon Valley’s outstanding women executives. She holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Louisiana State University.