HPCwire: An Interview with ISC'09 Keynote Speaker Andy von Bechtolsheim

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Special Features >> ISC09 >> ISC09 Features

June 21, 2009

An Interview with ISC'09 Keynote Speaker Andy von Bechtolsheim

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

When 1,500 leading members of the world’s high performance computing community convene June 23-26 at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, The opening keynote address will be presented by Andreas “Andy” von Bechtolsheim, the legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder and Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks. Von Bechtolsheim will discuss “The Evolution of Interconnects for High Performance Computing.”

ISC, which will be held in Hamburg for the first time in the 24-year history of the conference, has a well-established reputation for presenting well-founded, precise and up-to-date information in an environment that encourages informal conversations and sharing of ideas. And of all the thought-provoking sessions scheduled for ISC’09, none are likely to spark more discussion than the keynote addresses.

In his presentation, von Bechtolsheim will discuss trends in the high performance computation market, including the challenge of building large fabrics and the role of InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. He will also look at how to address the challenges of building, integrating, and using petascale systems including system power and cooling, system stability, and scalablity. Finally, he will look at the impact of solid state memory for HPC deployments and how it can address data bandwidth within the system to deliver improved overall performance through a more balanced system architecture.

Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista Networks Co-Founder Von Bechtolsheim was a co-founder and Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, responsible for next generation server, storage, and network architectures. From 1995-96, he was CEO and President of Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet Switching startup company he founded that Cisco acquired in September 1996. From 1996 to 2003, he was VP Engineering and later General Manager for the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco System that developed the Catalyst 4000/4500 Gigabit Switch family, the highest volume modular switching platform in the industry.

Von Bechtolsheim earned a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976. He was a doctoral student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1977-82. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

The following interview with von Bechtolsheim by Christoph Poeppe from “Spektrum der Wissenschaft” (the German sister publication of Scientific American) was translated by Jon Bashor and Heike Walther.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft: What drives a person, who was apparently meant to pursue a scientific career, to take a path that leads him to such exceptional commercial success? What went wrong?

Bechtolsheim: I don’t see any fundamental conflict between science and commercial success, at least not where I work -- in Silicon Valley. All in all, though, I have always been much less interested in academic research and much more interested in how to build better products that drive a commercial success.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft: But didn’t you start out as a physicist?

Bechtolsheim: Not really. In 1974, I did win the German Science Fair in Physics building a device that could precisely measure flows using ultrasound, and in high school I took advanced classes in physics and bio- chemistry, because these were the most interesting classes that were offered. But I was always much more interested in computers and computer science, which is really an engineering discipline. There have been very few major breakthroughs in mathematics and theory in the last twenty-five years that affected the field of computer science. All the new advances that we have seen were really based on better engineering.

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html