Mark J. Harris, a real-time computer graphics researcher for Nvidia, 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.[1]
Harris coined the term GPGPU, which stands for "General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units". He founded the website GPGPU.org[2] 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.[3][4]