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PARALLEL PROFILE
Charles Seitz
President Myricom, Inc.
Charles ("Chuck") Seitz is a prolific architect and designer of
innovative computing and communication systems, many of which have
exploited concurrency and parallelism at the forefront of technology.
Seitz is known for creating new disciplines of digital-system design and
for instilling these approaches in a generation of students and co-
workers, many of whom have themselves become leaders in distributed,
concurrent, and parallel computing. Seitz's 1992 election to the
National Academy of Engineering was with the citation "for pioneering
contributions to the design of asynchronous and concurrent computing
systems."
Seitz's fascination with digital-system design and with asynchronous and
concurrent systems began in the 1960s at M.I.T., where he earned S.B.,
S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering. Seitz recalls that,
"While a student, I sought out every opportunity, whether in M.I.T.
research projects or through consulting, to design logic. The logic
components of that time were expensive, whereas my experience was
slight, so it was difficult to persuade people to let me design these
systems." Many of these early projects were special-purpose computers
for processing graphical, image, or spatial data, applications that
could employ parallel-pipeline organizations. These projects included
experimental mobility aids and reading machines for the blind, the
Associated Press's wirephoto-translation computer, and the Harvard 3-D
display.
While a graduate student at M.I.T., Seitz taught courses in switching
and automata theory, was instrumental in establishing the digital-system
project laboratory courses, and received the M.I.T. Goodwin Medal "for
conspicuously effective teaching." His Ph.D. thesis provided a
mathematical foundation for asynchronous logic capable of accepting
concurrent input signals, and helped to expose the fundamental problems
of mutual exclusion and of synchronizing signals to a free-running
clock.
Seitz joined the faculty at University of Utah as assistant professor of
computer science, and worked at the newly founded Evans & Sutherland
Computer Corporation to design pipelined display processors. He then
moved to California to work for Burroughs, where he pioneered digital-
video techniques of aperture filtering for character and geometric
display.
In 1977, Seitz joined the computer science faculty at Caltech, where his
research and teaching activities were in the areas of microelectronic-
chip design and concurrent computing. In Seitz's concurrent-computing
research, principally under DARPA sponsorship, he and his students
developed the first multicomputer, the Cosmic Cube; devised the key
programming and packet-routing techniques for the second-generation
multicomputers; and transferred these technologies to industry. The
Intel Paragon and Cray T3D/E employ message-passing techniques licensed
from Seitz's Caltech patents.
In 1994, Seitz, his Caltech research team, and two researchers from
another DARPA-sponsored research project at USC Information Sciences
Institute founded Myricom, Inc., a company dedicated to making the high-
performance interconnect used in multicomputers available as a commodity
product. Myrinet, a gigabit-per-second packet-communication and
switching technology, is a direct descendent of multicomputer message-
passing networks, but without restrictions on link distance or network
topology. Myrinet is now used in 15 countries at more than 130 customer
sites, including most of the world's premier cluster-computing
installations. The multicomputer architecture lives on today in these
"clusters" of commodity workstations and PCs, used both for scientific
and database applications. Myricom's other principal market for Myrinet
products is embedded systems, used typically for signal and image
processing in military and industrial-control applications.
Seitz's articles have appeared in more than 50 publications, and he
holds 13 patents. In spite of the demands of a rapidly growing young
company, he continues to maintain close ties with his research and
academic colleagues, and to perform public service, such as serving on
the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
Research Council.
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