Frank Gerald Soltis, an American computer scientist, was International Business Machines Corporation"s Chief Scientist for the System i computers.
Education
Based on his Doctor of Philosophy research, his pioneering architecture of technology-independent machine interfaces (TIMI) and single-level stores has appeared in these eight generations of International Business Machines Corporation 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/Intellectual Property), the eServer iSeries, the System i5, the System i, and International Business Machines Corporation Power Systems running International Business Machines Corporation i (April, 2008). In 1968, Soltis completed his Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering from Iowa State University. His Doctor of Philosophy dissertation was titled "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing".
Career
In November 1968, he took a position with International Business Machines Corporation in Rochester, Minnesota. Soltis 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 International Business Machines Corporation iSeries and pSeries computers.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, in addition to his International Business Machines Corporation responsibilities, Soltis served as an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota where he taught graduate courses on high performance computer design.
Soltis retired from International Business Machines Corporation on December 31, 2008. In February 2009, Vision Solutions, a high availability and disaster recovery solutions provider in International Business Machines Corporation Power Systems markets, announced that Soltis had joined their Technology Advisory Board (Technical Assistance Board).
Soltis will share his experience and insight as he helps guide product strategies. Soltis" By Design column appears in iPro Developer magazine.
His books include Inside the AS/400 and Fortress Rochester, The Inside Story of the International Business Machines Corporation iSeries.
