Frank Soltis

Last updated
Frank Soltis 2008 Frank soltis.jpg
Frank Soltis 2008

Frank Gerald Soltis (born 1940), is an American computer scientist. He joined IBM Rochester in 1969, and is most well known for his contributions to the System/38 and IBM AS/400 architectures, in particular - the design of the single-level store used in those platforms, and the RS64 processor architecture. [1] He retired from IBM in 2008 upon the merger of the System i and System p product lines into IBM Power Systems. [2] Prior to his retirement, he held the title of Chief Scientist at IBM. [3]

Contents

Career

In 1968, Soltis completed his PhD in electrical engineering from Iowa State University. [4] His PhD dissertation was titled "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing". [5]

In November 1968, he took a position with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. Soltis led the design of the "Amazon" instruction set architecture, an extended version of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture; the Amazon architecture is implemented by the RS64, POWER4, and POWER5 processors used in the IBM iSeries and pSeries computers.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, in addition to his IBM responsibilities, Soltis served as an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota where he taught graduate courses on high performance computer design. [6] [7]

Soltis retired from IBM on December 31, 2008 [8] after 40 years with the company.

In February 2009, Vision Solutions announced that Soltis had joined their Technology Advisory Board. [3]

Soltis' By Design column appears in iPro Developer magazine. [9] His books include Inside the AS/400 and Fortress Rochester, The Inside Story of the IBM iSeries.

Books

Related Research Articles

Atanasoff–Berry computer Early electronic digital computing device

The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer. Limited by the technology of the day, and execution, the device has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC's priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete. Conventionally, the ABC would be considered the first electronic ALU – which is integrated into every modern processor's design.

PowerPC RISC instruction set architecture by AIM alliance

PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.

IBM AS/400 IBM midrange computer (1988–2013)

The IBM AS/400 is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cost but more powerful than its predecessors, the AS/400 was extremely successful at launch, with an estimated 111,000 installed by the end of 1990 and annual revenue reaching $14 billion that year, increasing to 250,000 systems by 1994, and about 500,000 shipped by 1997.

IBM Blue Gene Series of supercomputers by IBM

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

IBM i Operating system

IBM i is an operating system developed by IBM for IBM Power Systems. It was originally released in 1988 as OS/400, as the sole operating system of the IBM AS/400 line of systems. It was renamed to i5/OS in 2004, before being renamed a second time to IBM i in 2008. It is an evolution of the System/38 CPF operating system, with compatibility layers for System/36 SSP and AIX applications. It inherits a number of distinctive features from the System/38 platform, including the Machine Interface, the implementation of object-based addressing on top of a single-level store, and the tight integration of a relational database into the operating system.

IBM System/36 IBM midrange computer (1983–2000)

The IBM System/36 was a midrange computer marketed by IBM from 1983 to 2000 - a multi-user, multi-tasking successor to the System/34.

IBM System/38 IBM midrange computer (1978–1988)

The System/38 is a discontinued minicomputer and midrange computer manufactured and sold by IBM. The system was announced in 1978. The System/38 has 48-bit addressing, which was unique for the time, and a novel integrated database system. It was oriented toward a multi-user system environment. At the time, the typical system handled from a dozen to several dozen terminals. Although the System/38 failed to displace the systems it was intended to replace, its architecture served as the basis of the much more successful IBM AS/400.

The IBM RS64 is a family of microprocessors used in IBM's RS/6000 and AS/400 servers in the late 1990s.

Amdahl Corporation

Amdahl Corporation was an information technology company which specialized in IBM mainframe-compatible computer products, some of which were regarded as supercomputers competing with those from Cray Research. Founded in 1970 by Gene Amdahl, a former IBM computer engineer best known as chief architect of System/360, it was a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu since 1997. The company was located in Sunnyvale, California.

IBM Rochester IBM campus in Rochester, Minnesota

IBM Rochester is the facility of IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. The initial structure was designed by Eero Saarinen, who clad the structure in blue panels of varying hues after being inspired by the Minnesota sky, as well as IBM's nickname of "Big Blue". These features and the facility's size has earned it the nickname "The Big Blue Zoo" from employees.

A logical partition (LPAR) is a subset of a computer's hardware resources, virtualized as a separate computer. In effect, a physical machine can be partitioned into multiple logical partitions, each hosting a separate instance of an operating system.

Single-level storage (SLS) or single-level memory is a computer storage term which has had two meanings. The two meanings are related in that in both, pages of memory may be in primary storage (RAM) or in secondary storage (disk), and that the physical location of a page is unimportant to a process.

In computer science, capability-based addressing is a scheme used by some computers to control access to memory as an efficient implementation of capability-based security. Under a capability-based addressing scheme, pointers are replaced by protected objects that can be created only through the use of privileged instructions which may be executed only by either the kernel or some other privileged process authorised to do so. This effectively allows the kernel to control which processes may access which objects in memory without the need to use separate address spaces and therefore requiring a context switch when an access occurs.

The Commercial Processing Workload (CPW) is a simplified variant of the industry-wide TPC-C benchmarking standard originally developed by IBM to compare the performance of their various AS/400 server offerings.

IBM Power Systems Line of computer servers from IBM

Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines.

Precisely (company) Software company

Precisely, rebranded from Syncsort Incorporated in May 2020, originally founded as Whitlow Computer Systems, is a software company specializing in big data, high speed sorting products, ETL, data integration, data quality, data enrichment, and location intelligence offerings, for IBM i, Hadoop, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux, and mainframe computer systems. Its original, eponymously named product, SyncSort, was the dominant sort program for IBM mainframe computers during much of the 1970s and 1980s.

Glenn Henry(néGaylord Glenn Henry; born July 26, 1942 Berkeley, California), is an American computer industry executive, cofounder of Centaur Technology, and inventor of computer technology at the advent and frontier era of the development of personal computers. He holds over 300 US patents.

IBM POWER is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by IBM. The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC.

HelpSystems, LLC is an American information technology and software company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, working in the areas of systems and network management, business intelligence, security and compliance, for IBM i, Unix, Linux and Windows environments. The company is recognized as the biggest independent IBM i software vendor in the world.

Control Program Facility (CPF) was the operating system for the IBM System/38. CPF represented an independendent line of development at IBM Rochester, and was unrelated to the earlier and more widely used System Support Program operating system. CPF evolved into the OS/400 operating system, which was originally known as XPF.

References

  1. Woodie, Alex. "Frank Soltis Discusses A Possible Future for Single-Level Storage". itjungle.com. IT Jungle. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  2. Woodie, Alex (2008-12-08). "Soltis Exiting IBM, But He's Not Leaving the '400". itjungle.com. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  3. 1 2 "Vision Solutions Names Dr. Frank Soltis to Advisory Board" (PDF). VisionSolutions.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-02-11. Retrieved 2009-02-12.
  4. "Department of Computer Science - Alumni Database". Iowa State University. Archived from the original on 2008-05-12. Retrieved 2008-07-01.
  5. Soltis, Frank Gerald (1968). "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing". Iowa State University. ProQuest   302336202.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. "The AS/400's Grandfather Talks Past, Present, and Future". ITJungle Volume 17, Number 25 -- June 23, 2008. Archived from the original on September 4, 2008. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
  7. University of Minnesota Institute of Technology Bulletin (1997-99) at http://www.catalogs.umn.edu/archive/tcarchive/it4.pdf#page=5
  8. "Frank Soltis Calls It Quits". iprodeveloper.com. Retrieved 2012-07-26.
  9. "By Design". iPro Developer. Archived from the original on 2012-04-28. Retrieved 2008-04-15.