Tenacity and dedication are two of the adjectives that befit none more so than Andreas Bechtolsheim. For three decades now, he has worked tirelessly in his quest to build a computer that will represent the pinnacle of technology in the modern epoch.
To this end, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, better known as Andy has designed a very easy and powerful personal computer workstation called Sun Constellation System. It is hoped that this system will surely attain world’s fastest machine title after completing its installation process sometime later this year.
While developing this breakthrough Mr. Bechtolsheim has also designed another line of computers that promise to produce excellent processing power or storage capacity by using limited space. Despite being one of the richest people in the world, Andy is still always passionate to design more powerful computer. The latest system that he has designed is a supercomputer that is nowadays undergoing in its installation process at Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin and is the most up to date innovation that is full of style and simple engineering.
It is worth mentioning that Bechtolsheim is viewed by many as the successor to the famousSeymour Cray. Gray was hailed as a genius computer designer who time and again designed the world’s fastest computers from the 1960s till 1996 when he died in a car accident.
Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist and an avid supercomputer user, who was also one of the first customer of Sun Microsystems’ computers:
He is this amazing blend of artist and engineer and that reminds me of Seymour
It is very true that giving 18 hours a day to develop computers designs is not a mean feat in itself, especially when one is as rich as Andy. Now, at the same time we cannot also deny this fact that while being so passionate to design super computers he has also founded three successful companies, including being Google’s first financial backers.
Simple living and high thinking:
I think it is fair that Andy has gone on to attain such enormous wealth. Fair because, success has still not gone to his head. The reporter - who first interviewed Mr. Bechtolsheim in 1981 - revealed that this super computer scientist is so down to earth that he still wears Birkenstock sandals and dresses like a graduate student.
Ola Torudbakken, a Sun engineer who worked for Mr. Bechtolsheim on the Texas supercomputer from his home in Norway has his own experience with Andy to narrate. He unveiled that Sun’s chief architect Mr. Bechtolsheim was so hard working and dutiful that they began exchanging e-mail messages when it was 5 a.m. in California and it was almost a routine to complete their conversations as late as midnight West Coast time when Andy started his next day work in Europe.
He further asserted:
I try not to bother him between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. when he is having breakfast with his family
The day Mr. Bechtolsheim rejoined Sun in 2004 he started handling technical settings and dealing with problems that create barriers in the design and development of the fastest supercomputers. Because now, as supercomputers are transformed from custom processors to machines made from tens of thousands of off-the-shelf microprocessors, to create such designs becomes more challenging. Mr. Bechtolsheim is also quite serious to solve the shortcomings of those machines that claim high performance but perform very poorly in the real world applications.
World’s fastest computing machines are based on a single type of mathematical calculation but in fact some of the fastest supercomputers processing often gets slow when these systems come across some prearranged types of problems that involve the movement of major amounts of data between processors. Now, Mr. Bechtolsheim claims that they have overcome this problem too by modifying an industry standard data switch that makes it possible for any of the 13,000-plus Advanced Micro Devices Barcelona microprocessors to converse with each other more than 10 times faster as compared to existing switches.
Via:Nytimes
