Sun STARS around the globe: Erik Fischer

Tuesday May 20, 2008

What Hungarian city is administratively divided into 23 numbered districts, always written in Roman numerals??

If you don't know, you will have to pay a visit to this month's SunStar, Erik Fischer, to find out!

How long have you been employed at Sun and where are you located?

I am with Sun since 1994, which means that I am in my 15th year at Sun. (Happy Anniversary from the Divas ! ) I am dwelling in the Budapest, Hungary Sun office.

What is your current job role?

At Sun, you don't have one job, you have many . I am a Principal Engineer and also managing the Hungarian Systems Engineering team. My background is computer and CPU architecture, compliers, operating system architecture, application and system performance measurement and tuning, and High Performance Computing. My working hobby is security and CGI. So, the background and the long time experience makes me to have not a single job, but to help and contribute wherever I can. It is indeed a very pleasing situation, since the toughest, hardest and most challenging problems find me and I am happy to solve them! I am also handling the official press conferences on technical subjects and organizing and participating in many customer, partner and community activities. Finally I develop a bunch of tools for fun.

Because they are SuperHeros, Sun Stars use their Super Powers to get the job done. What are your Super Powers?

Well, I hardly believe, that I am a SuperHero, but my abysmal and everlasting love towards the architecture of microprocessors helped Sun and our customers a lot all over the world. It is truly one of the major passions of my life to let people know and understand more about the wonderful world and the technical beauty of the microprocessor microarchitecture. So I grab every possible opportunity to talk about it and help. Well, it might qualify as a Super Power...

What do you like best about working for Sun?

The talent, the excellence and the fantastic engineers that surrounds us all at Sun is the foundation of the company and what I like best.

Have you had the opportunity to assist customers in creating energy efficient data centers? If so, please give us an example.

I am an advocate of the energy efficient computing using our UltraSPARC T processor family, which I demonstrated and introduced at many customers and conferences.

Do you have a favorite blog or website? What about a favorite movie?

I do not have a single favorite site. I am a strong believer, that the Internet as a whole is one of the marvels of what technology can do to serve people. The Internet is something very close to mobile telephones and mobile communication which gives an unprecedented communication freedom to all of us. The wonder of the Internet is the community, the content and the possibilities both on gathering information, doing business or simply just reaching the other side of the world. This is fascinating, entertaining and also challenging at the same time and I love it!

Regarding movies, I am die hard fan of the moving pictures, but can not name just a single one. There are so many marvelous and beautiful movies and also there is a large number of very entertaining movies. I own a DVD collection of around 600-700 disks, each one is my favorite - and I can not have so many older ones - so if would be definitely a long list to name them all...

Do you participate in any social networking websites?

I regularly posting at various forums in my native language on the field of Solaris and microprocessors. I am also member of Facebook and LinkedIn.

Please list any Sun or external communities that you are a member of.

I am member of IEEE CS, I am a Sun Principal Engineer, member of the Sun Technical Systems Ambassador group, member of the Sun HPC Aces community and participating in several Hungarian Unix related user groups.

If you could go back or forward in time,where would you go?

Well, it is not an easy question. There were many-many interesting and wonderful moments in the history of our small planet, furthermore the future looks also very-very interesting. However, if I have to pick just one moment, I definitely would like to see the times (if they will come at all) when the human race leaves this planet and starts to colonize other habitable planets or finds intelligent life forms.

Outside of work and family, is there anything that you're passionate about?

As I already mentioned, I am a die hard fan of good movies. I am also the fan of contemporary classical music and own around 1200-1300 CDs full with truly wonderful - and sometimes hard to listen - music. I also very much enjoy contemporary literature, especially from South-America, from the Mediterranean region of Europe and from Japan. I am a collector and reader of science fiction and own around 2000 books. Also enjoy the history of computing machinery, drawing huge and small dragons and learning the Maori language. I try to ride my bike as much as possible and if my sons give me some free time, I make nature photos.

If you have an external blog, please send us the url.

I have my own web site, which is under construction currently: www.nomac.org