Biography

Steve has been active within the industry and academia. In industry, he joined IBM in the networking division in 1984 where he developed products, technology, and standards. He later moved into IBM's x86 server organization to focus on clustering with his areas of focus being systems architect, and eventually CTO, for BladeCenter and defining Infiniband as an initial cluster interconnect standard. He was designated a Distinguished Engineer during this time and engaged with teams across IBM, numerous technology partners, and customers to establish BladeCenter as an industry leading product.

He continued to develop next generation systems, technology and standards and was asked to join IBM Research Next Generation Computing team as chief systems architect, which included the development of a multicore processor for edge-of-network systems and applications for which he was designated an IBM Fellow. He continued to work in the areas of systems, networking, distributed storage, high availability, power-efficiency and acceleration (papers available), while part of both IBM Research and Systems until he retired June 2018 after 35 years.

Steve has been an adjunct professor at NC State since January 2000 continues to teach computer architecture and networking courses. In his spare time he enjoys the outdoors by hiking, running, biking, fishing, etc.

Research Areas

  • Architecture and Operating Systems
  • Cloud Computing
  • Networking and Performance Evaluation
  • Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Scientific and High Performance Computing

Education

  • 1984 - BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
  • 1988 - MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University, Raleigh, NC
  • 1997 - PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC

Publications

  • Workload and network-optimized computing systems, with David LaPotin, Shahrokh Daijavad, Charles Johnson, Kazuaki Ishizaki, Hubertus Franke, Heather Achilles, Dan Dumarot, Nancy Greco and Bijan Davari, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 54, Number 1, 2010.
  • Applying Amdahl’s Other Law to the Data Center, with Dave Cohen, Fabrizio Petrini, Mike Day, Muli Ben-Yehuda and Uri Cummings, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 53, Number 5, 2009.
  • AC Coupled Backplane Communications Using Embedded Capacitor, with Bruce Su, Pravin Patel, Moises Cases, Paul D Franzon, 17th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging, San Jose, CA, October 27-29, 2008.
  • BladeCenter Networking, with Norm Strole, David Cosby and David Green, IBM Journal of Research and Development, September/November 2005.
  • Workload-Based Power Management for Parallel Computer Systems, with Dave Bradley and Rick Harper, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Sept 2003.
  • Analysis and Implementation of Software Rejuvenation in Cluster Systems, with Kalyanaraman Vaidyanathan, Richard E. Harper, and Kishor Trivedi, ACM Sigmetrics 2001 Conf, Cambridge, Mass, June 16-20, 2001.