Winfried Wilcke
Dr. Winfried Wilcke
Senior Manager, Nanoscale Science & Technology
Program Director, Silicon Valley Projects
IBM Almaden Research Center, California
Wnfried W. Wilcke works at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He received a Ph.D. in experimental nuclear physics in 1976 from the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt, Germany, and worked at the University of Rochester, Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Los Alamos, co-authoring well over 100 papers on nuclear heavy-ion reactions and muon physics. In 1983 he joined IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, where he worked initially on VLSI RISC CPU design and then played a key role in convincing IBM to build very scalable message-passing supercomputers, which was an extremely controversial point of view. He became senior manager in charge of the Victor and Vulcan projects, which were the precursors of the very successful IBM SP message-passing supercomputer product line. Today, the fastest supercomputers in the world -like the IBM Blue Gene- are all based on this once so controversial model.
In 1991, Wilcke joined HAL Computer Systems as a very early employee. He was initially Director of Architecture and later CTO. HAL was instrumental in creating -in collaboration with Sun Microsystems- the 64-bit Sparc architecture, which has been the foundation of Sun's and Fujitsu RISC system businesses since 1996. HAL grew to over 400 employees and was acquired by Fujitsu. Today, the HAL Sparc64 processor architecture is now in its 5th generation and sold by both Fujitsu and Sun. In 1996 Wilcke retired and embarked on an extended tropical sailing voyage. In the late nineties, he missed the challenge of working in High Tech and rejoined IBM Research at Almaden, where, in 2001, he launched the IBM IceCube project, a highly scalable 'brick' architecture for data-intensive computing and storage. This technology formed the basis for Seval Systems, Inc., a venture-capital funded spin-out from IBM Research, led by Wilcke as CTO/acting CEO. However, he soon came to the conclusion that the expected ROI did not warrant continuation of the venture and shut it down within a year. He returned to lead research in physics, and is currently senior manager of the Almaden Nanoscience and Technology area, which is engaged in a wide variety of nanoscale activities, ranging from novel memory and storage devices to work on developing synapses for an artificial brain to energy related projects. He still remains active in computer architecture.
Wilcke just published an anthology, Random Walk, about his many (mis)adventures in Science and Technology and while playing with his airplanes, sailboats and underwater.
