Keith Bierman

Keith Bierman has been supporting the OpenSPARC team with his humor and vast bits and bytes of knowledge since November 2005.

He spent his formative professional years toiling in various parts of the Aerospace field. His primary focus was in the area of applications of Estimation Theory to various satellite, space probe, missile and general navigation problems. In the process, he learned increasingly more about how computers did (and did not) work and turned his focus towards computation. He consulted with JPL, whose Navigation group was responsible for the MarkII and MarkIII Hypercubes, his introduction to the "billion bunny" programming model.

His next stop was Cydrome, working on mini-supercomputing in the '80s. The Cydra 5 is not much remembered... but along with Multiflow (and the Culler-7 and the i860 ;>) he might argue it is the spiritual parent of IA64.

Keith joined Sun 17 years ago, and his SMI business cards have had a single title: Rabble Rouser. (Some of these "insights" are at www.blogs.sun.com/khb).

Early "rousing" occurred in the Compiler organization (which had many names, SunPro, IAPT, Forte, etc.). Along with Gregory Tarsy he brought Performance into the Floating Point group. He lectured almost every New Hire Engineering class on either "You and Your Compiler" or "The HitchHiker's Guide to Computer Architecture" -- based on a quick class vote. He served as Sun's representative to the Fortran Standards committees (ANSI/NCITS and ISO) as well as X3H5 and for a time, PCF.

Subsequently he joined the PHASER project -- a specialized supercomputer for accelerating Verilog RTL simulation, and recently he has been a member of the Performance, Availability and Architecture tools Engineering organization.

For several years Keith's primary vehicles were an aged 1987 Honda Shadow and a 2000 Corbin Sparrow (enclosed three wheeled electric motorcycle). He has a wife, a 2 yr old old son, and a 5 year old chow-golden-shepherd mix dog.