Advisors
InspireSemi has assembled a world-class team of accomplished professionals and industry leaders with expertise across an array of industries and domains, including HPC, AI, data science, semiconductor development, financial services/FinTech, and academia.
Advisors
Dr. Mark McDermott
Professor of Practice Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Mark McDermott is a Professor of Practice Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches courses in embedded system design. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico, a M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Mark has 50 years of industrial experience in management and product development of silicon systems. This includes: Senior Director at Apple, Inc., VP/GM at Intrinsity, Inc., VP of Engineering at Coherent Logix, CEO of DynaFlow Computing, Inc., VP Engineering at Somerset Embedded Technologies, Inc., VP Engineering at VisionFlow, Inc., General Manager and Director of the Texas Development Center for Intel Corporation, Director of the PowerPC Somerset Design Center and Director of the Austin Design Center for Cyrix, Inc.
Mark is a registered professional engineer and a member of the IEEE, ACM and TSPE. He has 21 patents and a number of publications in the areas of IC design and engineering management.
Dr. Dan Stanzione
Associate Vice President For Research and Executive Director, TACC
Dr. Dan Stanzione is a nationally recognized leader in the field of high performance computing who has made an impact in the open science community for more than 30 years.
He is Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), one of the leading advanced academic computing centers in the world and holds the position of Associate Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin.
Stanzione serves as the principal investigator (PI) for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF), which started construction in July 2024 and is expected to begin operations in 2026. The LCCF will deploy Horizon, which will be the largest academic supercomputer dedicated to open science research in the NSF portfolio.
Stanzione is also the PI for several current NSF-funded supercomputers including Frontera, the fastest supercomputer at a U.S. university, and Vista, an AI-centric system—all dedicated to open science research.
Stanzione received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and his master’s degree and doctorate in computer engineering from Clemson University.
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Steve Wallach
Guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Steve Wallach is currently a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Previously, he was Director System Architecture at Micron. Micron acquired Convey Computers where he was Chief Scientist and cofounder. Prior to that he was V.P. of technology for Chiaro Networks and was co-founder of Convex Computers, their Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and senior V.P. of development. After Hewlett-Packard bought Convex, Wallach became the CTO of the large systems group. He was also a visiting professor at Rice University 1998-1999. Prior to Convex, he was manager of Advanced Development for Data General. His efforts on the MV/8000 are chronicled in “The Soul of a New Machine”. From 1970 to 1975, he was a senior engineer with Raytheon Missile Systems Division, Bedford, Massachusetts.
Wallach earned his BSEE From the Polytechnic University, New York (formerly Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn), and a MSEE From the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Boston University. Wallach has 102 American patents and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, recipient of the Seymour Cray Award, and was a founding member of PITAC, (The Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee).
Steve Yatko
CEO of Oktay Technology
Steve is the CEO of Oktay Technology where he has led his boutique consulting firm of IT Experts over the past sixteen years into multi-year strategic technology and trusted advisory partnerships with some of the most innovative and successful firms on Wall Street and FinTechs, including Bridgewater Associates, State Street, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, DriveWealth, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Liquidnet, Swift Corp and IHS Markit. The nations third largest transportation agency, NJ Transit, and the largest Engineering and Design firm in North America, Colliers Engineering and Design.
Previously, Steve was a Managing Director and Global Head of the IT Research & Development at Credit Suisse. In this role, Steve was responsible for setting the direction of the Firm’s next generation computing environment spanning applications and infrastructure across all of its IT divisions world-wide.
Throughout his career, Steve has worked with serial Entrepreneurs, top Venture Capital firms around the world, and some of the world’s largest technology providers including being a selected member to CTO Advisory boards such as Sun Microsystems, MSFT, EMC, HP, IBM Research, Veritas, and Cisco.