Hello and welcome to my web page!
My name is Nicholas Patapoff and I make graphics cards do things they were not strictly designed to do. I write CUDA kernels, build GPU-accelerated ML pipelines, and every so often I wander down to the bare metal and write firmware for microcontrollers.
I started out as a chemist — a real one, with a lab coat and a B.S. in Chemistry — before discovering that the thing I actually liked about chemistry was the simulation part. These days I care about the same things I always did: what happens at the smallest scale, and how fast it can be made to happen. Memory hierarchy, kernel occupancy, and shaving milliseconds off an inference loop.
I live in San Jose, California. If you have a problem that is embarrassingly parallel, we should talk.
Cool Stuff I Made
- A100 MatMul Optimizer — hand-tuned CUDA matrix multiply using shared memory tiling and warp-level primitives. NEW!
- ProteinSimGPU — molecular dynamics engine for proteins, with both CPU and CUDA backends. My chemistry degree, finally justified.
- Modal A100 Playground — serverless GPU experiments: distributed training, custom ops, multi-GPU communication patterns.
Where I've Worked
Hardware Engineer — PurcellAI (2025–now)
- Built a full-stack data pipeline, from serial capture on embedded devices up to orchestration in Python.
- Firmware for the Arduino Nicla Vision (Cortex-M7) in C++ and Mbed OS, including hand-rolled SPI routines.
- Deployed quantized models on-device: 90% accuracy at 120 ms real-time inference.
Computational Physics Engineer — LongShot Space (2024–2025)
- CUDA-accelerated 1D simulation of a booster-aided light gas gun — 50× faster than the CPU version.
- Pipelines running 500+ concurrent simulations on a single GPU, extended to multi-GPU.
- Profiled and tuned kernels for ~30% better memory throughput under large-batch loads.
Characterization Engineer — DragonFly Energy (2022)
- Used FTIR, RAMAN and QCL spectroscopy to design new methods for battery degradation analysis.
- Chased down failure mechanisms: dendrites, delamination, gassing, and bad SEI formation.
School
- M.S. Computer Science — Arizona State University, 2025
- B.S. Chemistry — University of Nevada, Reno, 2022