Gregory Michael Papadopoulos (born 1958) is an American engineer, computer scientist, executive, and venture capitalist. He is the creator and lead proponent for

Redshift In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and increase in frequency and e ...

, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by

Moore's Law Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...

Biography

Papadopoulos received a B.A. in

systems science Systems science, also referred to as systems research or simply systems, is a transdisciplinary field that is concerned with understanding simple and complex systems in nature and society, which leads to the advancements of formal, natural, socia ...

from the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

in 1979, and an S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) in 1983 and 1988. At some time he held positions at

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

and

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...

. While a graduate student, he worked at the MIT spinoff PictureTel in its early days. His dissertation was on a

dataflow architecture Dataflow architecture is a dataflow-based computer architecture that directly contrasts the traditional von Neumann architecture or control flow architecture. Dataflow architectures have no program counter, in concept: the executability and ex ...

microprocessor, under his advisor Arvind. Along with David E. Culler, he developed a simplified approach to dataflow execution in a project named Monsoon. Papadopoulos became assistant professor at MIT in 1988 and associate professor in May 1993. He helped start Ergo Computing in 1988, and Exa Corporation in 1991. He was chief architect at

Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at th ...

starting in 1992. His research applied

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

techniques to

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

. He joined

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

in September 1994. After serving as chief scientist for the server division, in December 1995 he became chief technical officer (CTO) of SMCC (Sun's hardware division), and CTO of the entire company in April 1998. He left Sun in February 2010. Papadopoulos co-authored (with David Douglas and John Boutelle) the book ''Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering'', published in 2009. At the time he lived in

Los Gatos, California Los Gatos (; ; ) is an List of municipalities in California, incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is located in the San Franc ...

. In 2010 Papadopoulos joined the

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

firm

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

(NEA) as an executive in residence and the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

as a director. In April, 2011, Papadopoulos became a partner at NEA. At some time, he was chairman of the board of trustees for the

SETI Institute The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization incorporated in 1984 whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to use this knowledge to inspire and guide present and futu ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Papadopoulos, Greg Living people Sun Microsystems people University of California, San Diego alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni MIT School of Engineering faculty American chief technology officers American business executives American people of Greek descent 1958 births