Steven "Steve" J. Wallach (born September 1945 in Brooklyn, New York) is an engineer, consultant and technology manager. He is a Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award recipient. [1]
Wallach received his BS in electrical engineering from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, his MS in electrical engineering, from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Boston University.
Wallach retired from Micron, and is currently a guest scientist at LANL (Los Alamos). He is also a visiting scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC). Main focus on HPC RISC-V technology. Wallach was the co-founder and CTO of Convey Computers. After Micron Technology bought Convey, Wallach became a design director. Wallach was previously Vice President of technology for Chiaro Networks and was co-founder of Convex Computer, their Chief Technology Officer and Senior V.P. of Development. After Hewlett-Packard bought Convex, Wallach became the chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard's large systems group. He was also a visiting professor at Rice University from 1998–1999. Prior to Convex, he was manager of Advanced Development for Data General. His efforts on the MV/8000 are chronicled in Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winner The Soul of a New Machine . [2] Prior to that, he was an engineer at Raytheon, where he worked on the All Applications Digital Computer (AADC). [3] [4]
Wallach has 94 american patents and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a IEEE Fellow and was a founding member of PITAC (The Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee).
He is currently an adviser to Centerpoint Venture partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Interwest, and a consultant to the United States Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) program at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He donated his personally library of papers, engineering note books, to the Computer Museum. In 2023 he was interviewed by the ACM History Committee
Wallach was awarded in 2008 Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award for his "contribution to high-performance computing through the design of innovative vector and parallel computing systems, notably the Convex mini-supercomputer series, a distinguished industrial career and acts of public service." [1] In 2002 he received the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award. Member Eta Kappa Nu & Tau Beta Pi. In 2024 he was named as one of the HPC legends.
Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research, which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Convex Computer Corporation was a company that developed, manufactured and marketed vector minisupercomputers and supercomputers for small-to-medium-sized businesses. Their later Exemplar series of parallel computing machines were based on the Hewlett-Packard (HP) PA-RISC microprocessors, and in 1995, HP bought the company. Exemplar machines were offered for sale by HP for some time, and Exemplar technology was used in HP's V-Class machines.
A superminicomputer, colloquially supermini, is a high-end minicomputer. The term is used to distinguish the emerging 32-bit architecture midrange computers introduced in the mid to late 1970s from the classical 16-bit systems that preceded them. The development of these computers was driven by the need of applications to address larger memory. The term midicomputer had been used earlier to refer to these systems. Virtual memory was often an additional criteria that was considered for inclusion in this class of system. The computational speed of these machines was significantly greater than the 16-bit minicomputers and approached the performance of small mainframe computers. The name has at times been described as a "frivolous" term created by "marketeers" that lacks a specific definition. Describing a class of system has historically been seen as problematic: "In the computer kingdom, taxonomic classification of equipment is more of a black art than a science." There is some disagreement about which systems should be included in this class. The origin of the name is uncertain.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese computer engineer and internet entrepreneur.
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.
NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.
Chapel, the Cascade High Productivity Language, is a parallel programming language that was developed by Cray, and later by Hewlett Packard Enterprise which acquired Cray. It was being developed as part of the Cray Cascade project, a participant in DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which had the goal of increasing supercomputer productivity by 2010. It is being developed as an open source project, under version 2 of the Apache license.
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. He is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia and was previously a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Marc Snir is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He holds a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He was the principal investigator (PI) for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC).
Shaheen is the name of a series of supercomputers owned and operated by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Shaheen is named after the Peregrine Falcon. The most recent model, Shaheen III, is the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East.
Prithviraj "Prith" Banerjee is an Indian American academic and computer scientist and is currently the Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS and board member at Cray and CUBIC. Previously, he was a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry where he was responsible for IOT and Digital Transformation Advisory Services within the Global Industrial Practice. Before that he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Schneider Electric. He was formerly a senior vice president of research at Hewlett Packard and director of HP Labs. Previously he was the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of ABB Group. He was also the Managing Director of Global Technology R&D at Accenture. Prith started his early career in academia as a Professor at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of high-performance computing. The award honors scientists who exhibit the creativity demonstrated by Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research, Inc., and an early pioneer of supercomputing. Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. He played a key role in the invention and design of the UNIVAC 1103, a landmark high-speed computer and the first computer available for commercial use.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Steve Scott is a computer architect who currently serves as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Scott was previously a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Cray Inc., Principal Engineer at Google and the chief technology officer for Nvidia's Tesla business unit. Scott was employed by Cray Research, Inc., Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Cray, Inc. from 1992 to 2011.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computing:
Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting High Performance Computing (HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in Milpitas, California with a computing center in Houston, Texas, and a manufacturing and support subsidiary in South Korea and Japan.
LUMI is a petascale supercomputer located at the CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland. In January 2023, the computer became the fastest supercomputer in Europe.