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Donald Becker is an American
computer programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming.
The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...
who wrote
Ethernet
Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
drivers for the
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
operating system.
Becker, in collaboration with
Thomas Sterling, created the
Beowulf clustering software while at
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
, to connect many inexpensive PCs to solve complex math problems typically reserved for classic
supercomputer
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 instruc ...
s. For this work, Becker received the
Gordon Bell Prize in 1997.
Becker became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Scyld Computer Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Penguin Computing, a developer and supplier of Beowulf clusters.
References
External links
Scyld Computer Corporation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Becker, Donald
Free software programmers
American chief technology officers
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people