Tadashi Watanabe

Chief designer of SX-2, the first supercomputer introduced by NEC in 1983, which boasted the world's fastest speed at that time, Watanabe is a Japanese computer engineer widely recognized as a pioneering force in supercomputer architecture.

In 1968 he joined NEC Corporation, where he played a central role in the development of the NEC SX architecture and was engaged in the development of large-scale computers until December 2005. NEC Corporation is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers.

Before joining RIKEN in 2006, he joined the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and has served as Director for Research Promotion of MEXT as a project leader of the Next Generation Supercomputer Project. He has also served as project manager of the RIKEN Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center.

Watanabe is also widely recognized as having been an instrumental force working closely with the team at Fujitsu in developing the world's most powerful supercomputer, the K computer, which is rated at 10.51 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark and held the number one slot on the TOP500 list in 2011. He holds a B.E. degree in Electronic Engineering and an M.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokyo in Japan. He earned his Ph.D. in Information Science at the University of Tohoku, located in Sendai, Miyagi in the Tōhoku Region of Japan.

He received the IEEE Computer Society's Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1998 for "contributions to the architectural design of supercomputers with multiple/parallel vector pipelines and programmable vector caches." He also received the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2006, becoming the first Japanese individual to receive this award, for playing a central role in the successive development of the SX Series and the Earth Simulator, which was certified as the world's fastest supercomputer for three years running from 2002 to 2004. NEC's SX Series and the Earth Simulator both employed the vector principle that was invented by Seymour Cray.