Donnie Jones
Founder · Ultimate Candles
- Married with 4 big dogs, Texas Malinois (Great Dane and Belgian Malinois mix).
- Austin, TX since 2009.
Backend compiler engineer, NVIDIA, 17 years.
Jan 2009 – Mar 2026, Fermi through Blackwell.
- Cross-team and global collaboration. Partial loop unroller in two compilers. Runner DSL initially for Volta bringup, general static perf testing with parallel threads for speedup, DSL functions like programmable make to run commands written in AST-literal Python thus no parsing required. Generated compiler C code using Python and database ISA. Performance and bug fixing across the backend. BF16, RoundStochastic compiler support. Genetic search to find best compiler strategies to maximize performance on public CUTLASS Hopper. Generative AI backend GPU compiler — initial design.
University of Kentucky — graduate work.
- Parallel Haskell with Simon Marlow and Satnam Singh (ThreadScope).
University of Kentucky — undergraduate.
- Modernlend technical co-founder — home mortgage search engine to better match homeowners with local lenders and their preferences. Start-up also pitched as senior project and accepted. $100k angel invested. Many lenders signed up; mortgage customers hard to find ~2007 — too few customers signed up after 3 months of marketing on Google Ads and funds ran low; many site visitors but low turnover rate to mortgage customers; returned to grad school.
- With Hank Dietz and Tim Mattox on their cluster, research project: a multicast layer for collectives over UDP on commodity hardware.
- Solar car — co-team captain, two cars built. Programmed microcontrollers for Solar maximum power point tracker, motor controller, radio modem, LCD display.