Dr. Frank Gerald Soltis

An American computer scientist, he has described himself as the grandfather of the AS/400. He was IBM's Chief Scientist for the System i computers. Based on his Ph.D. research, his pioneering architecture of technology-independent machine interfaces (TIMI) and single-level stores has appeared in eight generations of IBM hardware: System/38 in 1978, the CISC AS/400 in 1988, the RISC AS/400 in 1995, the web server AS/400e in 1999 (supporting HTTP and TCP/IP), the eServer iSeries, the System i5, the System i, and IBM Power Systems running IBM i (April, 2008). In 1968, he completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University. His dissertation was titled, "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing". In November 1968, he took a position with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. He led the design of the "Amazon" instruction set architecture, an extended version of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture; the Amazon architecture is implemented by the RS64, POWER4, and POWER5 processors used in the IBM iSeries and pSeries computers. As of 2008, in addition to his IBM responsibilities, he serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Minnesota where he teaches graduate courses on high performance computer design. He retired from IBM on December 31, 2008. In February 2009, Vision Solutions, a high availability and disaster recovery solutions provider in IBM Power Systems markets, announced that he had joined their Technology Advisory Board (TAB). He will share his experience and insight as he helps guide product strategies. His publication, ?By Design? column appears in iPro Developer magazine. His books include ?Inside the AS/400? - Duke Press. ISBN 1-882419-66-9, (1997); and ?Fortress Rochester, The Inside Story of the IBM iSeries? - NEWS/400 Books. ISBN 1-58304-083-8, (2001).