Mr. Ravi Arimilli

He was named an IBM Fellow, the company's highest technical honor, in May 2001. As Chief Architect, he is largely responsible for development of the POWER5. One of the most prolific inventors in the world, he has over 474 patents to his name and is currently listed among the top 20 patent holders alive in the United States of America. He has won IBM's Inventor of the Year award each year since 1998. He moved with his family to the United States from Andhra Pradesh, India, in 1969, settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He studied Electrical Engineering at Louisiana State University, graduating with a B.S. Degree in 1985, after which he joined IBM. He worked on the team that was developing the first RISC microprocessor for the IBM RT/PC, a system that ran IBM's version of Unix, AIX 1.0. He is regarded as IBM's leading expert on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system structures, cache/memory hierarchies and system bus protocols. His career has included work on the Blue Pacific supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and he was Chief Architect and Lead Engineer of IBM's Power4 GigaProcessor Storage subsystem for its 32-way e-server p690, code-named Regatta. Most of the patents he received in 2002 centered on innovations for this system, which is based on 16 "servers on chip," each integrating dual microprocessor cores, cache, I/O, switches and memory. His main contribution to the Regatta was the full subsystem. He chose that area because he believed microprocessor microarchitecture was hitting a wall and soon would no longer be able to achieve 2x to 4x performance increases with each new design. IBM has said in a press release in 2001that his innovative concepts have been central to the industry-leading performance of its RS/6000 and eServer pSeries Unix systems in commercial, technical and Web server applications. His system structures and cache microarchitectures delivered such servers as the IBM RS/6000 Models J30/R30 and F50/H50, "both of which set new performance records at time of announcement", the company said.