Robert Ober has 25 years experience in processor and system architecture. He is a Fellow in the Office of the CTO at LSI Logic, working in the Advanced Technology and Architecture Group. Previously Robert was a Fellow in the Office of the CTO AMD, with responsibility for mobile and embedded platform solutions and wireless strategy, was one of the founding Board members of OLPC ($100 laptop.org) and was influential in its technical evolution.

Simon Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating Sun's extensive participation in free and open source software communities, promoting consistency and best practice and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun's pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com

Prof. Jose Renau is an assistant professor of computer engineering at at the University of California Santa Cruz. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focusses on computer architecture, including design effort and complexity estimators, chip multi-processors, energy/performance trade-offs, thread level speculation, processors-in-memory, and checkpointed architectures. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.

Allan Strong been working on Niagara since early 2001, when he was VP of VLSI in Afara WebSystems. Niagara was a bit different then as it designed for 130nm TSMC process running Linux instead of the current Niagara which is designed for a 90nm TI process running Solaris 10.

Tom Thatcher graduated from Seattle University with a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering. He worked for 2 years for a startup called Seattle Silicon, which made standard cell compilers, and automated place & route tools. He then went back to school, and graduated from the University of Illinois with a Masters Degree.

He went to work for Hewlett-Packard in their California Design Center, where he contributed to ASIC designs for HP's very successful laser printers. Following the HP/Agilent split, he transferred to a Networking group in Agilent, where he worked on mixed-signal PHY chips for Ethernet and FibreChannel systems. He joined Sun in September of 2003, where he has been working on formal verification.

Marc Tremblay has a long history with microprocessor innovation at Sun. He was co-architect for Sun's UltraSPARC I, the MDR Microprocessor of the Year in 1995, and chief architect for the UltraSPARC II microprocessor. He was also the chief architect for the MAJC Program, which was nominated for best emerging technology in 1999 and best media processor in 2000 by MDR Analysts. He also started and architected the picoJava processor core, a Java bytecode engine.

David Weaver has been involved with SPARC for over 20 years. He originally hired on at Sun to lead the SPARC software effort (compilers, OS port, etc) and became active on Sun's SPARC Architecture Committee. He served as Sun's technical liaison to AT&T duing the "great Berkeley/AT&T Unix merge" and later as Sun's program manager for a 5-year joint project with Fujitsu.