David B. Kirk

B.S., M.S.
MIT Mechanical Engineering M.S., Ph.D.
Caltech, Computer Science, minor in Computation and Neural Systems Roles at NVIDIA included Chief Scientist, VP of Architecture, VP of Research, Co-VP of Software Elected to National Academy of Engineering Computer industry veteran, having built products at Raster Technologies, Apollo Computer, Hewlett Packard, Crystal Dynamics, and NVIDIA? David Kirk, Venture Partner at DigitalDx, was a born engineer, always inventing and building things.
After Mechanical Engineering degrees at MIT, David worked on CAD and workstations, and this led him to making pictures with computers.
David specialized in computer graphics, VLSI, and analog computing at Caltech.
There was a strong synergy with these topics and neural networks, Analog VLSI, and neurobiology.
David drove graphics technology at video game developer Crystal Dynamics.
This led to NVIDIA, building graphics chips for 3D graphics for PCs.
As Chief Scientist and VP of Architecture, David led architecture and technology development for a series of products.
In a few short years, single chip 3D PC graphics accelerators surpassed the performance of million dollar graphics systems built by SGI and others.
During the course of this innovation, David was inventor or co-inventor of nearly 100 patents.
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) rapidly became the most powerful and versatile computing devices on the planet.
As GPUs became more programmable, they presented a programming challenge; modern computer science had not contemplated devices with hundreds of processors and thousands of threads.
The task of driving GPU adoption shifted from creating computer graphics to teaching parallel programming.
David founded the research division of NVIDIA, focusing on graphics architecture and algorithms, rendering applications and algorithms, and programming models.