Andrew Chien
Vice President, Corporate Technology Group
Director, Intel Research
INTEL CORPORATION
As a Vice President of the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Intel Research, Dr. Andrew Chien oversees Intel's exploratory research. This includes Intel's innovative network of university research labs, a portfolio of internal research projects, and leadership of Intel's research programs with universities and governments around the world. These activities span a broad spectrum of technical areas including computer architecture, distributed systems, networking, communications, machine learning, human-computer interaction, ethnography and emerging markets, with focus on making technology more viable, more useful, more personal, and more essential in our daily lives.
Recent Past Positions
Prior to joining Intel, Dr. Chien was a research leader in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He was the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Endowed Chair Professor and the founding director of the Center for Networked Systems (CNS)-a university-industry alliance focused on developing technologies for robust, secure, and open networked systems. While at UCSD, Dr. Chien led activities comprising 20 faculty, over 50 graduate students, and over $10M of activities. These large-scale academic research projects were supported by government agencies like DARPA, NSF, NASA, ONR, numerous private foundations and corporate sponsors including Intel, AT&T Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Alcatel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, IBM, and Motorola.
For more than 20 years, Dr. Chien has worked in the research and development of high-performance computing systems. His expertise includes networking, grids, high performance clusters, distributed systems, computer architecture, high speed routing networks, compilers, and object-oriented programming languages. He was the chief software architect for OptIPuter and the Virtual Grid Application Development System project (VGrADS).
- Areas of Major Research Contributions
- Design and analysis of high-speed parallel computer interconnects which exploit adaptive routing
- Design, analysis, and optimization of concurrent object languages and systems
- Design of low-overhead communication mechanisms for high-performance clusters and techniques for delivering that performance at the application-level
- Development of modeling tools and technologies for computational grids
Earlier Positions and Accomplishments
From 1990 to 1998, Dr. Chien was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During that time, he held joint appointments with both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), working on large-scale clusters. In 1998, Dr. Chien and his research group partnered with NCSA to build the NT Supercluster - at that time the world's largest, scalable Microsoft Windows NT * system with 192 processors in 96 dual processor Intel® Pentium® Pro systems. The NT Supercluster reduced the cluster hardware system cost from millions of U.S. dollars to less than $200K and was a precursor to widespread use of cost efficient high performance cluster computing.
From 1994-1997, Dr. Chien developed the Illinois Fast Messages (FM) low-overhead communication library. This library provided breakthrough performance on clusters of low-cost PC's, delivering a 20 times improvement in overhead, latency, and delivered message throughput. FM was a technical contributor to the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) standard led by Intel, which later merged with Infiniband, a major storage and cluster interconnect standard. Part of the seed funding for the “Fast Messages” software was provided by an Intel Research Council Grant.
Awards, Fellowships and Papers
Dr. Chien has received numerous awards including a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Xerox Excellence in Research Award, and numerous best paper awards. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has published over 130 technical papers. Dr. Chien is a contributing author to “The Grid: Blueprint for a New Generation Computing Infrastructure”, the 1st and 2nd Editions, as well as “Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality”.
Dr. Chien has served in leadership roles in a number of professional, research and industrial standards organizations, including director of the UCSD Center for Network Systems (CNS), ACM SIGPLAN, IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems, Area Chair and Steering Group member of the Global Grid Forum, Chair of the Peer-to-Peer Working Group and the Technical Advisory Board for the NSF Teragrid.
Organizations
In 2006 Dr. Chien was appointed to the National Science Foundation CISE (Computer & Information Science and Engineering) Advisory Committee. He also serves as a member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) board. His previous memberships included leadership roles in a number of professional, research and industrial standards organizations, including director of the UCSD Center for Network Systems (CNS), ACM SIGPLAN, IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems, Area Chair and Steering Group member of the Global Grid Forum, Chair of the Peer-to-Peer Working Group and the Technical Advisory Board for the NSF Teragrid.
In addition to his research activities, Dr. Chien has been actively involved in the development of commercial technologies and business strategies. In 1999 he co-founded Entropia, Inc., an enterprise desktop Grid company. He served as chief technology officer and chairman of the board until 2003.
Education
Dr. Chien received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1984, his M.S. in computer science in 1987, and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1990, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the late 1980's while a graduate student at MIT, Andrew worked on an advanced microprocessor (multi-computer node) prototype designed in collaboration with and fabricated by Intel.
