Mark Harris (programmer)


Mark J. Harris is the Chief Technologist for GPU Computing at NVIDIA. He received a B.S. from the University of Notre Dame in 1999. He received a Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation and the first of his several papers on computer graphics, "Real-Time Cloud Rendering and Simulation", proposed a real-time algorithm approximating Rayleigh scattering to realistically render clouds using 2-dimensional transparent billboards.
Harris coined the term GPGPU, which stands for "General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units". He founded the website GPGPU.org in 2002, and he continues to maintain the site as of February 2010.
Since being hired by Nvidia, Harris has published several works in the field of real-time rendering and parallel algorithms, including an article for GPU Gems 2 on GPU-based fluid simulation.