Will Usher
Scientific Visualization Engineer
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWill Usher is a Scientific Visualization Engineer with 13 years of experience building high-performance CPU and GPU ray tracing systems for scientific visualization, film, and web-based rendering. He led GPU and MPI-parallel rendering work in OSPRay at Intel and now applies Physics AI to accelerate analysis and visualization at Luminary. An active open-source contributor and core developer of OSPRay, he created ChameleonRT and tools like ispc-rs and WebGPU/WebGL visualization projects that the community uses for terascale data. His research includes 15 journal papers (9 in IEEE TVCG), a patent, and pioneering work on terascale WebGPU visualization, reflected in a Google Scholar h-index of 19. He combines deep systems expertise—porting ISPC to macOS/Arm64 and improving pbrt and GLM build systems—with practical skills in distributed MPI buffering and cross-team production deployment. Based in Los Angeles, he holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and pairs rigorous research with production-grade engineering.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
The University of UtahBachelor's Degree, Physics, Bachelor's Degree, Physics at University of California, Riverside
Stackoverflow
361reputation
17kreached
7answers
1question
Github Skills (48)
cpp-library10
keyboard-input10
c-language10
event-handling10
keyboard-events10
mpi10
build-system10
cmake10
imgui10
keyboard10
compiler-compiler10
glium10
compiler10
simd10
error-handling10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
RenderKit/ospray
Mar 2015 - Nov 2022
An Open, Scalable, Portable, Ray Tracing Based Rendering Engine for High-Fidelity Visualization
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:962 commits, 7 PRs, 75 comments in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Will made contributions related to safe buffered MPI comm manager. This involved code changes within the ospray/mpi/MPICommon.cpp, ospray/mpi/MPICommon.h and ospray/mpi/MPIDevice.cpp files. Their work included modifications to the MPI interface, setting up of buffers, sending and receiving of messages.
c-plus-plusray-tracingosprayvolume-renderingportable
ispc/ispc
Apr 2016 - Aug 2022
Intel® Implicit SPMD Program Compiler
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Build/Release Engineer
Back-end Developer & Build/Release EngineerContributions:1 review, 16 commits, 2 PRs in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily focused on improving the Intel® Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) by enhancing its compatibility, functionality, and build processes. Their contributions include enabling support for macOS and Arm64 targets, which involved modifying the target triple configuration. They also addressed target name collisions, optimized dependency handling within the CMake build system, and integrated definitions for GPU targets. Furthermore, the user implemented a feature for setting local group sizes for kernels and updated the build system to handle oneAPI installations.
cpusimdavximplicitavx512
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