IBM Honors Its Top Technologists With Fellow Status
April 16, 2012 Dan Burger
Sadly, science and technology creates few celebrities. The occasional Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg breaks into the limelight, but they are known more for being successful business people than scientists and technologists. Almost all the incredible innovators in the IT world remain anonymous on the worldwide stage. But excellence does not go unrewarded. Each year since 1962, IBM selects a handful of employees to receive its most prestigious technical honor. It’s a rare club, the IBM Fellows, made up of individuals who have played a leading role in developing some of the world’s most important technologies; the Fellow title is a bit like being knighted by the Queen of England, and is in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements and leadership in engineering, programming, services, science and technology. Only 238 individuals at IBM have earned this designation, including the 2012 additions; 77 of them are active employees. “Technology innovation is at the core of everything we do to help our clients make the world work better,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM president and chief executive officer in a press release announcing the 2012 award winners. “IBM’s 2012 Fellows represent the very best of this culture of innovation and I’m honored to recognize their outstanding accomplishments.” For 2012, there are seven new innovators. Balaram Sinharoy is one of the world’s top processor architects. Among the technologies he has pioneered are simultaneous multi-threading and power-efficient, high-performance, multi-core server design. Sinharoy is currently chief architect of IBM’s next generation Power technology, responsible for micro-architecture and differentiation features. Before that, he was chief architect of IBM’s Power7 processor and was responsible for defining the Power7 micro-architecture. His office is within the Systems and Technology Group in Poughkeepsie, New York. Paul Coteus’ contributions have been applied to memory, power, packaging and cooling for high speed computing systems, most notably the BlueGene supercomputer, the 104 rack system with 212,000 cores at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is a founding member and chief engineer of the BlueGene project, and was responsible for the system’s power, packaging and cooling, including the reliability of design. His office is in the IBM Research facility in Yorktown Heights, New York. Ronald Fagin is a founder of relational database theory, the creator of the field of finite model theory, the author of seminal works in information integration and aggregation, and a thought leader in the field of reasoning about knowledge. He has advanced both the theory and practice of modern computing systems, especially data management systems. His key inventions include extendible hashing, widely used in database query processing; differential data backup, a key feature of Tivoli software, and critical tools for database design. Fagin is employed at IBM Research in San Jose, California. Vincent Hsu has a long history of innovation in storage system architectures, creating workload optimized solutions through intelligent data placements. He is the founding architect for EasyTier, the next-generation of storage virtualization that is in the Storwize V7000 arrays and the new PureSystem machines announced last week by IBM. Hsu is defining the next generation of storage platforms, designed to deliver data on demand. You’ll find him at IBM Systems and Technology Group offices in Tucson, Arizona. Jeffrey Jonas was founder and chief scientist of Systems Research and Development, a company that IBM acquired in 2005. He now applies his expertise and passion in analytics and big data. Jonas is internationally recognized as a leader in his field and advises both private and public sector organizations. He is currently leading an effort to deliver real-time “sensemaking” analytics. This technology is designed to analyze transactions in real time. “Context aware computing” holds big promise for organizations across a variety of industries as well as government. Jonas goes to work at the IBM Software Group in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ruchir Puri has led the fundamental transformation of microprocessor design in IBM’s high-performance enterprise systems. Throughout his career, he has shown a passion for pushing the boundaries of design automation to reduce dependence on labor-intensive manual design. Puri led this new design approach and directed global teams from IBM Research and Systems and Technology Group to execute the transformation. Like Paul Coteus, he works at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. Luba Cherbakov is a highly regarded technical leader whose work has been in the creation and use of emerging technologies where she has contributed to IBM projects such as Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, Rivers-for-Tomorrow, Situational Applications Environment, The Genographic Project and IBM Virtual Spaces. Cherbakov works for IBM Enterprise Transformation in Bethesda, Maryland. More information on IBM Fellows can be found at this IBM website. RELATED STORIES IBM Names Eight New (Jolly Good Technical) Fellows Speaking of IBM i Innovation . . .
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