Curtis Priem

Curtis Priem graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1982 with a major in Computer Systems Engineering and minors in Computer Science and Music. He designed the first graphics accelerator for the Personal Computer: the IBM Professional Graphics Controller and created the first CGI ray trace image on a PC. He went on to be the architect of the Sun Microsystem’s GX which was the standard graphics accelerator across all their workstations. He co-founded Nvidia Corporation and was the architect of Nvidia’s NV Architecture which the Integrated Media Interface (IMI), the Graphics Processor Unit (GPU), the Unified Driver Architecture (UDA), and the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) products were are built upon. He is an inventor on almost 200 U.S. and international patents. Curtis is currently the Vice Chair of Rensselaer’s Board of Trustees and his foundation funded the bringing of the IBM System One to Rensselaer’s campus.