Taiwan-born supercomputer star helps China
By John Markoff The New York Times Tuesday, November 2, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO Add Steve Chen to the growing list of America's high-technology exports.
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Chen, a Taiwanese-born U.S. citizen who was considered one of the nation's most brilliant supercomputer designers while working in the United States for the technology pioneer Seymour Cray in the 1980s, has moved to China, where he is leading an effort to claim the world computing speed record.
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The Chinese government is seizing upon supercomputing to help speed the nation's transition from low-cost manufacturing to becoming a more powerful force in the world economy. China's leaders know that high-speed computing is essential to global leadership in scientific fields and advanced design of a variety of sophisticated products.
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"Right now the Chinese have started to pay attention; they are catching up, and they learn fast," said Chen, 60, who is splitting his time between China and San Jose, California, where his wife, Kate, and their four children live.
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Military intelligence experts in this country have long been concerned that supercomputing capabilities may aid China's weapons development. But many technologists and economists say that blazing computing speeds alone do not represent a particularly new nuclear weapons threat. Instead, they are more concerned that the Chinese may catch up more quickly with the United States in areas that have economic and scientific ramifications.
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Chen's decision to set up shop in China was driven in part by an unexpected twist: The opportunity to build a new company looked more promising to him there than in the United States, where he was unable to secure financing from U.S. venture capitalists for his latest ideas. Chen concluded that the fallout from the collapse of the Internet bubble had poisoned the investment climate.
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"I saw the crazy stuff going on," he said recently in a telephone interview. "A lot of people got hurt."
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While Chen is not a native of mainland China, his decision has parallels to an increasingly common odyssey by foreign-born researchers, who once would have found the greatest openings to use their skills in the United States. Talented people are returning to China, India and other developing countries to create or join advanced technology firms.
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In May, Chen joined Galactic Computing Shenzhen. His move reflects the fact that the market for high-performance computing is growing more rapidly in China than elsewhere in the world.
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The Chinese are not a major force in supercomputing, but according to U.S. computing experts, that is changing.
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Galactic recently demonstrated a prototype of Chen's newest supercomputer at a biomedical research institute in Beijing. The machine, he said, is capable of one trillion calculations a second.
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Such computing now occupies a central role in the global economy, providing stark proof that decades-long U.S. attempts to control the flow of advanced information-processing technologies are largely moot.
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It is only a matter of time, experts say, before companies in countries like China, India and Russia match the capabilities of the U.S. and Japanese leaders.
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Now that computer chips openly available anywhere in the world have reached such high speeds, the expertise needed to build supercomputers has shifted to the software needed to hook hundreds or thousands of processors together. Chen is recognized as one of the world's pioneers in that specialty.
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He arrived in the United States from Taiwan in 1975, at age 31, to pursue graduate studies in computer science.
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After leaving Cray Research, Chen established in September 1987 his own supercomputing company, Supercomputing Systems, with backing from IBM. Later, Chen became the chief technology officer of Sequent Computer Systems, which was later acquired by IBM.
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U.S. supercomputer experts said Chen's move to China could have a major impact, similar to the shock felt among government technology insiders in 2002 when Japan developed the Earth Simulator, now the world's fastest supercomputer.
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Chen said he still viewed himself primarily as a scientist dedicated to contributing to supercomputer design in ways that would benefit not just China but the United States and the rest of the world, too. He said he intended to pursue that goal with whoever offered him the greatest help.
