As the chief architect, I was technically responsible for proposing Sun's high-end server architectures. My group consisted of about 70 highly educated members, most of them former Thinking Machines employees.
My first architecture, WildFire [29] initiated as my own underground project "FireStation," is Sun's largest computer system as of today. The scalability of this architecture relies on my research results from SICS and on many new original research results from Sun. The system is built a number of large computer nodes (SMPs) communicating with each other over a high-speed, low-latency interconnect. A user sees all the resources in a fairly uniform way. Many application-transparent optimization techniques are used to give the illusion of one large SMP. WildFire is today installed at several beta sites, such as MIT, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratories, Naval Research Lab, Uppsala University and the University of Wisconsin.
My second architecture is the key technology for Sun's next-generation high-scalability and high-availability systems. It was recently selected as a possible supercomputer technology for the Department of Energy's ASCI pathforward program and was awarded 11 million dollars in development money by the DoE (press release). This indirectly means that DoE judges my second architecture capable of delivering 30 TFlops and several TB/s bisectional bandwidth by year 2001. In November 1997, I was awarded the President's Award personally from Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy.