pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...
: Chén Shìqīng; born 1944) is a Taiwanese computer engineer and internet entrepreneur.
Chen was elected to the US
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
in 1991 for leadership in the development of super-computer architectures and their realization.
Education
Chen earned a
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...
from
National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University (NTU; zh, t=國立臺灣大學, poj=Kok-li̍p Tâi-oân Tāi-ha̍k, p=, s=) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. Founded in 1928 during Taiwan under J ...
in 1966, a
Master of Science
A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...
from
Villanova University
Villanova University is a Private university, private Catholic Church, Catholic research university in Villanova, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded by the Order of Saint Augustine in 1842 and named after Thomas of Villanova, Saint Thom ...
in 1971 and a
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...
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
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...
in 1975.
Career
From 1975 through 1978 he worked for
Burroughs Corporation
The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company by William Seward Burroughs I, William Seward Burroughs. The company's history paralleled many ...
on the design of the
Burroughs large systems
The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit computing, 48-bit mainframe computer, mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense Syllable (computing), syllables.E.g., 12-bit syllables for B5000, 8-bit syllables f ...
line of
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. 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, 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 perfo ...
and
Cray Y-MP
The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray, Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's Cray X-MP, X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-densit ...
multiprocessor supercomputers. Chen left
Cray Research
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 i ...
in September 1987 after it dropped the MP line.
With
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
's financial support, Chen founded Supercomputer Systems 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
Eau Claire ( ; lit. "clear water") is a city in Eau Claire County, Wisconsin, Eau Claire and Chippewa County, Wisconsin, Chippewa counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It is the county seat, seat of Eau Claire County. It is the List of citie ...
-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
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. was a computer company that designed and manufactured multiprocessing computer systems. They were among the pioneers in high-performance symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) Open system (computing), open systems, innovatin ...
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
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' that Chen was considered "one of the nation's most brilliant supercomputer designers while working in this country for the technology pioneer
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) – was an American
Shenzhen
Shenzhen is a prefecture-level city in the province of Guangdong, China. A Special economic zones of China, special economic zone, it is located on the east bank of the Pearl River (China), Pearl River estuary on the central coast of Guangdong ...
,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
.
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 fro ...
to model a human brain instead.
By 2010, he was reported to be working on technology to use
cloud computing
Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...
to improve
health care
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...
Taiwanese Americans
Taiwanese Americans ( Chinese: 臺灣裔美國人; pinyin: ''Táiwān yì měiguó rén''; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: ''Tâi-Bí-jîn'') are Americans of Taiwanese ancestry, including American-born descendants of migrants from the Republic of China (Taiwan) ...