Dr. Steve Chen

A computer engineer and pioneer, he is the founder and CEO of Galactic Computing, a developer of supercomputing blade systems, based in Shenzhen, China. He holds an M.S. from Villanova University and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is best known as the principal designer of the Cray X-MP and Cray Y-MP multiprocessor supercomputers. He left Cray Research in 1987. With IBM's financial support, he founded Supercomputer Systems Incorporated in January 1988. SSI was devoted to development of the SS-1 supercomputer, which was nearly completed before the money ran out. The Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based company went bankrupt in 1993, leaving more than 300 employees jobless. An attempt to salvage the work was made by forming a new company, SuperComputer International (SCI), later that year. SCI was renamed Chen Systems in 1995. It was acquired by Sequent Computer Systems the following year. John Markoff, a technology journalist, wrote in the New York Times that he was "considered one of the nation's most brilliant supercomputer designers while working in this country for the technology pioneer Seymour Cray in the 1980s."