Peter Hofstee

Last updated
Peter Hofstee
Peter portrait.jpg
Peter Hofstee (October 2014)
Born1962
Groningen, Netherlands
NationalityDutch
Alma mater University of Groningen
Caltech
Scientific career
Thesis Synchronizing processes  (1995)
Doctoral advisor Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
K. Mani Chandy

Harm Peter Hofstee (born 1962) is a Dutch physicist and computer scientist who currently is a distinguished research staff member at IBM Austin, USA, and a part-time professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.

Contents

Heterogeneous computing

Hofstee is best known for his contributions to Heterogeneous computing as the chief architect of the Synergistic Processor Elements in the Cell Broadband Engine processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3, [1] [2] and the first supercomputer to reach sustained Petaflop operation. After returning to IBM research in 2011 he has focused on optimizing the system roadmap for big data, analytics, and cloud, including the use of accelerated compute. His early research work on coherently attached reconfigurable acceleration on POWER7 paved the way for the new coherent attach processor interface on POWER8. [3] Hofstee is an IBM Master Inventor with more than 100 issued patents. [4]

Background

Hofstee was born in Groningen and obtained his master's degree in theoretical physics of the University of Groningen in 1988. He continued to study at the California Institute of Technology where he wrote a master's thesis Constructing Some Distributed Programs in 1991 [5] and obtained a Ph.D. with a thesis titled Synchronizing Processes in 1995. [6] He joined Caltech as a lecturer for two years and moved to IBM in the Austin, Texas Research Laboratory, where he had staff member, senior technical staff member and distinguished engineer positions.

Previous Positions

Lecturer (Member of the Faculty) at California Institute of Technology, Computer Science Department
Research Staff Member at IBM Austin Research Laboratory
Senior Technical Staff Member, Cell SPE Chief Architect at IBM Microelectronics Division / IBM Systems and Technology Group
Distinguished Engineer, Cell/B.E. Chief Scientist at IBM Systems and Technology Group

Current positions

Distinguished Research Staff Member, Workload-Optimized and Hybrid Systems at IBM Austin Research Laboratory
Professor, Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Since 2011, Peter is leading the Big Data system design work at IBM. In March 2016, Peter was appointed as professor to the chair of Big Data Computer Systems at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at Delft University of Technology.

Awards

For Cell Broadband Engine, 2006
For Zebra/Ivy Grant Program Initiation, Jan. 2004 ( precursor to Roadrunner )
In appreciation for the world's first 1-GHz PowerPC Microprocessor, Feb. 1998
The Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology, 1995-96
1991-1993

Memberships/Honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Sutherland</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer

Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. In 2012 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Research</span> IBMs research and development division

IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research organization in the world and has twelve labs on six continents.

Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Bader (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist

David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech. Bader has served on the Computing Research Association's Board of Directors, the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and on the IEEE Computer Society's Board of Governors. He is an expert in the design and analysis of parallel and multicore algorithms for real-world applications such as those in cybersecurity and computational biology. His main areas of research are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics. Bader built the first Linux supercomputer using commodity processors and a high-speed interconnection network.

PowerLinux is the combination of a Linux-based operating system (OS) running on PowerPC- or Power ISA-based computers from IBM. It is often used in reference along with Linux on Power, and is also the name of several Linux-only IBM Power Systems.

Reynold B. Johnson was an American inventor and computer pioneer. A long-time employee of IBM, Johnson is said to be the "father" of the hard disk drive. Other inventions include automatic test scoring equipment and the videocassette tape.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Hendler</span> AI researcher

James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerard J. Holzmann</span> Dutch-American computer scientist

Gerard J. Holzmann is a Dutch-American computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs and NASA, best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker.

Brent Hailpern is a computer scientist retired from IBM Research. His research work focused on programming languages, software engineering, and concurrency.

The School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. is a technical school which specializes in engineering, technology, communications, and transportation. The school is located on the main campus of the George Washington University and offers both undergraduate and graduate programs.

Krishna V. Palem is a computer scientist and engineer of Indian origin and is the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice University and the director of Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He is recognized for his "pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing", as stated in the citation of his 2009 Wallace McDowell Award, the "highest technical award made solely by the IEEE Computer Society".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. Mohan</span> American computer scientist

Chandrasekaran Mohan is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He was born on 3 August 1955 in Tamil Nadu, India. After growing up there and finishing his undergraduate studies in Chennai, he moved to the United States in 1977 for graduate studies, naturalizing in 2007. In June 2020, he retired from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center after working at IBM Research for 38.5 years. Currently, he is a visiting professor at China's Tsinghua University. He is also an Honorary Advisor at the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) in Chennai and an advisor at the Kerala Blockchain Academy in Kerala.

Stephen Brobst is an American technology executive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM</span> American multinational technology corporation

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, and has held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.

Bijan Davari is an Iranian-American engineer. He is an IBM Fellow and Vice President at IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Hts, NY. His pioneering work in the miniaturization of semiconductor devices changed the world of computing. His research led to the first generation of voltage-scaled deep-submicron CMOS with sufficient performance to totally replace bipolar technology in IBM mainframes and enable new high-performance UNIX servers. As head of IBM’s Semiconductor Research Center (SRDC), he led IBM into the use of Copper interconnect, silicon on insulator (SOI), and Embedded DRAM before its rivals. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and is known for his seminal contributions to the field of CMOS technology. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of the J J Ebers Award in 2005 and IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award in 2010. At the present time, he leads the Next Generation Systems Area of research.

Mootaz Elnozahy is a computer scientist. He is currently a professor of computer science at the computer, electrical and mathematical science, and engineering (CEMSE) division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He previously served as Special Advisor to the President and Dean of CEMSE. Elnozahy's research area is in systems, including high-performance computing, power-aware computing, fault tolerance, operating systems, system architecture, and distributed systems. His work on rollback-recovery is now a standard component of graduate courses in fault-tolerant computing, and he has made seminal contributions in checkpoint/restart, and in general on the complex hardware-software interactions in resilience.

Hui Lei is a Chinese-American Computer Scientist and Software Engineer. He is known for his work in cloud computing, big data, and mobile computing. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Vice President at Futurewei Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Leymann</span> German computer scientist and mathematician

Frank Leymann is a German computer scientist and mathematician. He is professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and director and founder of the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mason Lamar Williams</span> American engineer, physicist, and inventor in Magnetic Recording

Mason Lamar Williams III was an engineer and physicist, noted for his contributions in the areas of magnetic recording and data storage on hard disk drives (HDD). A large part of his career was with the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. After retiring, Williams played a major role in the restoration and demonstration of the IBM RAMAC at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Thompson (engineer)</span> American data storage engineer and inventor

David A. Thompson is an American electrical engineer and inventor with a long career at IBM. He is noted for his many contributions to magnetic recording technology. Thompson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the invention and development of the thin-film inductive head and the magnetoresistive read head. These heads are now ubiquitous in all hard-disk drives and magnetic tape recorders.

References

  1. David Becker (December 3, 2004). "PlayStation 3 chip goes easy on developers". CNET . Retrieved January 13, 2019.
  2. Scarpino, M. (2008). Programming the cell processor: for games, graphics, and computation. Pearson Education.
  3. "IBM Research Blog: Making Power Open to the Enterprising Masses". IBM. May 15, 2014. Retrieved January 13, 2019.
  4. JUSTIA Patents, Patents by Inventor Harm Peter Hofstee
  5. Master Thesis PDF: Constructing Some Distributed Programs
  6. PhD Thesis PDF: Synchronizing Processes