Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

In the Presence of Greatness

I am not a humble person.  Yet, this morning, I found myself sitting (mostly) quietly, listening to Dr. Steve Chen.  The following is an excerpt from Dr. Chen's biography: 

"Dr. Steve Chen took his doctoral degree under Professor David Kuck at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After his graduation, he joined Cray Inc., rising to the post of Principal Designer and Senior Vice President. Dr. Chen led the R&D effort on the development of the Cray-XMP and YMP vector machines which was widely used in the western world for research in defense, aerospace and aeronautic engineering, automobile design, gas and oil exploration, material science, meteorology, environmental engineering, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical, biological science and physics. Dr. Chen is well known in the world of science and engineering as a "super star" in the field of super computing.

In 1991, Dr. Chen and Professor David Tuck were nominated as members of the National Academy of Engineering by the National Science Advisor of the Nixon administration. Dr. Chen is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences."

Need I say more?  Only this: growing up in the industry, Cray was a legendary name.  Super computers were spoken of with awe.  I can't remember where it was, but I clearly remember seeing an old Cray super computer, one of the early ones, in a museum.  I was standing there, appreciating the strange shape and color, reading about the incredible number of instructions that the strange looking machines can run in a second.  Awesome.  Strangely, it all came back to me today.  And the feeling was, well, humility would describe it best.

Sin-Yaw Wang, our site VP, asked me to join him for the meeting with Dr. Chen.  There was no way I would miss it.  The reason why we came to see Dr. Chen was to make him an interesting proposition.  To consider Solaris for operating system in his projects.  We, Sun, can offer Dr. Chen the best, fastest, most reliable, scalable and secured OS on the planet, along with first class assistance from our top Solaris developers.  But whatever the reason for this meeting was, I will remember it for a long time.  It was a privilege.

Posted at 09:05PM May 22, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[0]