November 1, 2004
Have Supercomputer, Will Travel
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/technology/01chen.html?th

The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 25 - Add Steve Chen to the growing list of America's
high-technology exports.

Mr. Chen, a Taiwanese-born American citizen who was considered one of the
nation's most brilliant supercomputer designers while working in this
country for the technology pioneer Seymour Cray in the 1980's, has moved to
China - where he is leading an effort to claim the world computing speed
record.

Supercomputing is being seized upon by the Chinese government to help speed
the nation's transition from low-cost manufacturing to becoming a more
powerful force in the world economy. China's leaders know that high-speed
computing is essential to global leadership in scientific fields and
advanced design of a variety of sophisticated products.

"Right now the Chinese have started to pay attention; they are catching up
and they learn fast," said Mr. Chen, 60, who is splitting his time between
China and San Jose, Calif., where his wife, Kate, and their four children
live.

Military intelligence experts in this country have long been concerned that
supercomputing capabilities may aid China's weapons development. But many
technologists and economists say that blazing computing speeds alone do not
represent a particularly new nuclear weapons threat. Instead, they are more
concerned that the Chinese may catch up more quickly with the United States
in areas that have economic and scientific, rather than military,
ramifications.

Mr. Chen's decision to set up shop in China was driven in part by an
unexpected twist: the opportunity to build a new company looked more
promising to him there than in the United States, where he was unable to
secure financing from American venture capitalists for his latest ideas. Mr.
Chen concluded that the fallout from the collapse of the Internet bubble had
poisoned the investment climate.

"I saw the crazy stuff going on," he said recently in a telephone interview
from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. "A lot of people got hurt."

While Mr. Chen is not a native of mainland China, his decision has parallels
to an increasingly common odyssey by foreign-born researchers, who once
would have found the greatest openings to use their skills in the United
States. As the spread of capitalism creates opportunities elsewhere, many
such talented people are returning to China, India and other developing
countries to create or join advanced technology firms.

In May, Mr. Chen joined Galactic Computing Shenzhen, which is backed by
investment money from a Hong Kong company that supported an earlier Chen
venture and with further backing from a group of Chinese universities. His
move reflects the fact that the market for high-performance computing is
growing more rapidly in China than elsewhere in the world.

The Chinese are not yet a major force in supercomputing, but according to
American computing experts, that is changing rapidly.

Today there are 14 Chinese supercomputers among the top 500, ranking the
country fourth in the world, equal to Germany and behind only the United
States, Japan and Britain. In June, a supercomputer assembled at the
Shanghai Supercomputer Center using more than 2,500 chips designed and
manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif., became the
world's 10th-fastest computer.

"In terms of momentum they are the most rapidly ascending country in the
world," said David Keyes, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia
University, who visited China last month to participate in a conference on
high-performance computing.

Galactic recently demonstrated a prototype of Mr. Chen's newest
supercomputer at a biomedical research institute in Beijing. The machine, he
said, is capable of one trillion calculations a second, a performance level
that would place it among the top half of the world's 500 fastest computers.


Such computing now occupies a central role throughout the global economy,
providing stark proof that decades-long American attempts to control the
flow of advanced information-processing technologies are largely moot. It is
only a matter of time, experts say, before companies in places like China,
India and Russia essentially match the capabilities of the American and
Japanese leaders.

"When they really get noticed,'' said Horst D. Simon, director of the
computation center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
California, "will be when a country like Malaysia or Australia decides to
buy a supercomputer from a Chinese company like Mr. Chen's rather than from
I.B.M."

Now that computer chips openly available anywhere in the world have reached
such high speeds, the expertise needed to build supercomputers has shifted
to the software needed to hook hundreds or thousands of processors together.
Mr. Chen has long been recognized as one of the world's pioneers in that
specialty.

He arrived in the United States from Taiwan in 1975, at age 31, to pursue
graduate studies in computer science. During the 1980's, Mr. Chen was widely
considered one the leading computer designers in the United States.

As a computer architect at Cray Research from 1979 to 1987, he gained a
reputation for machines that were both elegant and blindingly fast. He also
became known as a visionary who frequently needed assistance in finishing
overambitious projects.

"He's very charismatic," said David J. Kuck, a computer scientist and Intel
researcher, who was Mr. Chen's professor in a Ph.D. program at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1970's. "His English
wasn't the greatest, but everyone understood what he wanted to do."

As a graduate student, Mr. Chen designed one of the first software programs
known as a parallel compiler, which was useful in restructuring programs so
they could run on computers with multiple processors. That pioneering work
became the basis for much of today's commercial parallel computing software.


At Cray Research, Mr. Chen had an intense rivalry with Mr. Cray, who was
leading a team that pursued a competing design. Ultimately, Cray's chief
executive, John Rollwagen, canceled one of Mr. Chen's computer projects.
Soon afterward, in September 1987, Mr. Chen established his own
supercomputing company, Supercomputing Systems, with backing from
International Business Machines.

That effort led to a partially completed prototype, but the company failed
commercially in 1992 when I.B.M. canceled funding. Because the Cold War was
ending, military funding for high-performance computing slowed dramatically.
Later, Mr. Chen became the chief technology officer of Sequent Computer
Systems, which was later acquired by I.B.M.

Mr. Chen's decision to try his luck in China as an entrepreneur stands in
contrast to an earlier example of technology transfer from the United States
to China. During the 1950's Tsien Hsue-shen, a leading aerospace designer
with a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, was deported from
the United States as a presumed security threat during the Communist witch
hunts of the McCarthy era. After returning to China, he became the father of
the country's intercontinental missile program.

During the Clinton administration, Washington attempted to control the flow
of high-performance computers to China because of fears they could be used
to design nuclear weapons. That policy, with modifications, has continued.
Indeed, just this month, State Department officials renewed calls for
maintaining the arms sales embargo against China, which extends to
restrictions on the fastest computers.

But with the new type of supercomputer - which blends thousands of freely
available off-the-shelf microprocessors connected via high-speed fiber-optic
cables that can stretch for hundreds of miles - restrictions on the sale of
so-called dual-use computers that have both military and civilian
applications no longer stand in the way of developing systems able to
compete with the fastest machines made by American and Japanese companies.

American supercomputer experts said that Mr. Chen's move to China could have
a major impact, similar to the shock felt among government technology
insiders in 2002 when Japan developed the Earth Simulator, currently the
world's fastest supercomputer.

"There is no stronger form of technology transfer than to have a world-class
expert go off with all his knowledge," said Seymour Goodman, a physicist at
the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in Atlanta.

Mr. Chen was an eager convert to American ways after he moved to the United
States from Taiwan, even bringing members of his extended family to Eau
Claire, Wis., where he established a stylish Chinese restaurant.

Mr. Chen said he still viewed himself primarily as a scientist dedicated to
contributing to supercomputer design in ways that would benefit not just
China but the United States and the rest of the world, too. He said he
intended to pursue that goal with whoever offered him the greatest help.

That reflects long-held views, which he expressed in an interview with The
New York Times in the early 1990's.

"I come from a very humble family and Confucian teachings are in my
background,'' he said then. "When I came to the United States and I observed
this disciplined, businesslike, practical manner, I found a marriage of the
two cultures. I also saw the bad points of each.''

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