Dr. Paul Coteus

A 2012 IBM Fellow, he has led the system packaging of BlueGene for more than a decade, and serves as Chief Engineer. He has tackled some of the thorniest technical challenges in the field of high performance computing. An Illinois native and son of a tool and die maker, he graduated from Bradley University with a degree in Physics. After receiving his Ph.D. in Physics at Columbia University, he became Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and spent the next seven years immersed in elementary particle physics research. Since joining IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as Research Staff Member in 1988, he has become the company's foremost expert in systems packaging, a field in which he has earned many of the 119 patents to his credit. He has managed the Systems Packaging Group since 1994, where he directs and designs advanced packaging for high speed electronics, including I/O circuits, memory system design and standardization of high speed DRAM, and high performance system packaging. He is one of the chief engineers behind BlueGene/L, which rocked the world of supercomputing when it was introduced in 2004 and quickly earned the title, "fastest computer in the world." His packaging innovations for the BlueGene system, which won IBM the National Medal of Technology in 2009, have been crucial to the power efficiency and reliability of a supercomputer that operates at a mind-boggling top speed of 210 trillion floating point instructions a second. The BlueGene/L design - which bundled together 100,000 processors and 7 million memory chips - presented a daunting packaging problem, which he solved with several key innovations, including a clever design that minimized external cabling. He has remained a core architect for subsequent generations of the system including BlueGene/Q, which was announced last year and is currently number one on the Green500 list of most energy efficient supercomputers. He is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of IBM's Academy of Technology, and an IBM Master Inventor. He has authored more than 90 papers in the field of electronic packaging, and holds over 100 US patents. He is currently full time working on IBM's next generation Exascale computer system.