Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and employee number one, is the Chief Architect and Senior Vice President, Network Systems organization. He is also a member of Sun's executive management team. In his new role, Bechtolsheim drives the rapid productization of next generation network server technologies.

Bechtolsheim received a MS in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 and he was a PhD student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Seager received his B.S. Degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in 1979 and received his PhD in Numerical Analysis from the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. Mark started working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1983 and has been working in the field of parallel processing ever since. He manages the Platforms Program for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program at LLNL and has managed multiple vendor partnerships to successfully deploy architectures such as ASCI Blue Pacific (3.9 TF/s in 1998), ASCI White (12.3 TF/s in 2000) and Purple (100TF/s in 2005) and BlueGene/L (360 TF/s in 2005). In addition, Dr. Seager developed the LLNL Linux strategy and helped deploy multiple generations of leading edge clusters (MCR at 11.3 TF/s in 2002 and Thunder at 23 TF/s in 2004, Multiple Peloton SU clusters at 100TF/s in 2006-7). Dr. Seager is now focused on the challenges of peta-scale systems, simulation environments and applications development strategies.

Building, integrating and using petascale systems have many challenges including system power and cooling, system stability, scalablity, simulation environment and the development of petascale applications. In this talk, we discuss these challenges and provide some approaches to addressing these challenges. In addition, we discuss some recent scientific results from petascale systems that make the whole effort worthwhile.