Steve Chen (;
pinyin: Chén Shìqīng) (born 1944 in
Taiwan) is a Taiwanese computer engineer and internet entrepreneur.
Chen was elected to the US
National Academy of Engineering in 1991 for leadership in the development of super-computer architectures and their realization.
Life
Chen earned a BS from
National Taiwan University in 1966. MS from
Villanova University in 1971 and a PhD under
David Kuck
David J. Kuck, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1993. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck. While at the U ...
from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975.
From 1975 through 1978 he worked for
Burroughs Corporation on the design of the
Burroughs large systems line of
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a 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 ...
s.
He is best known as the principal designer of the
Cray X-MP
The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance ...
and
Cray Y-MP multiprocessor supercomputers. Chen left
Cray Research in September 1987 after it dropped the MP line.
With
IBM's financial support, Chen founded
Supercomputer Systems
A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer arch ...
Incorporated (SSI) in January 1988.
SSI was devoted to development of the
SS-1 supercomputer, which was nearly completed before the estimated $150 million investment ran out. The
Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based company went bankrupt in early 1993, leaving more than 300 employees jobless.
An attempt to salvage the work was made by forming a new company,
SuperComputer International (SCI), later that year. SCI was renamed
Chen Systems in 1995. It was acquired by
Sequent Computer Systems the following year.
John Markoff
John Gregory Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at ''The New York Times'' for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture ...
, a technology journalist, wrote in the ''
New York Times'' that Chen was considered "one of the nation's most brilliant supercomputer designers while working in this country for the technology pioneer
Seymour Cray in the 1980s."
In 1999, Chen became founder and CEO of
Galactic Computing, a developer of
supercomputing blade systems
A supercomputer is a 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 instructio ...
, based in
Shenzhen,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
.
At Tonbu, Inc., his team designed and implemented the world's first fully scalable cloud computing system. A fully scalable dynamic process and application engine.
By 2005 he started to focus on
grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...
to model a human brain instead.
By 2010, he was reported to be working on technology to use
cloud computing to improve
health care
Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profe ...
in rural China.
In 2011, he founded
Information Supergrid Technologies USA.
See also
*
Taiwanese Americans
References
External links
Galactic Computing
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chen, Steve
1944 births
Living people
American computer businesspeople
American people of Chinese descent
Cray employees
Businesspeople in information technology
Computer designers
People from Nanping
Supercomputing in China
Taiwanese emigrants to the United States
Grainger College of Engineering alumni
Villanova University alumni