Frank Gerald Soltis (born 1940), is an American computer scientist. He joined

IBM Rochester IBM Rochester is the facility of IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. The initial structure was designed by Eero Saarinen, who clad the structure in blue panels of varying hues after being inspired by the Minnesota sky, as well as IBM's nickname of " Bi ...

in 1969, and is most well known for his contributions to the

System/38 The System/38 is a discontinued minicomputer and midrange computer manufactured and sold by IBM. The system was announced in 1978. The System/38 has 48-bit addressing, which was unique for the time, and a novel integrated database system. It w ...

and

IBM AS/400 The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cost ...

architectures, in particular - the design of the

single-level store Single-level storage (SLS) or single-level memory is a computer storage term which has had two meanings. The two meanings are related in that in both, pages of memory may be in primary storage (RAM) or in secondary storage (disk), and that the ph ...

used in those platforms, and the

RS64 The IBM RS64 is a family of microprocessors used in IBM's RS/6000 and AS/400 servers in the late 1990s. These microprocessors implement the "Amazon", or "PowerPC-AS", instruction set architecture (ISA). Amazon is a superset of the PowerPC instr ...

processor architecture. He retired from IBM in 2008 upon the merger of the System i and System p product lines into

IBM Power Systems Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines. History IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware l ...

. Prior to his retirement, he held the title of Chief Scientist at IBM.

Career

In 1968, Soltis completed his PhD in electrical engineering from

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the ...

. His PhD dissertation was titled "Automatic Allocation of Digital Computer Storage Resources for Time-sharing". In November 1968, he took a position with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. Soltis led the design of the "Amazon" instruction set architecture, an extended version of the

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A compu ...

PowerPC architecture; the Amazon architecture is implemented by the

POWER4 The POWER4 is a microprocessor developed by International Business Machines (IBM) that implemented the 64-bit PowerPC and PowerPC AS instruction set architectures. Released in 2001, the POWER4 succeeded the POWER3 and RS64 microprocessors, ena ...

, and POWER5 processors used in the IBM iSeries and pSeries computers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, in addition to his IBM responsibilities, Soltis served as an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

where he taught graduate courses on high performance computer design. Soltis retired from IBM on December 31, 2008 after 40 years with the company. In February 2009, Vision Solutions announced that Soltis had joined their Technology Advisory Board. Soltis' ''By Design'' column appears in iPro Developer magazine. His books include ''Inside the AS/400'' and ''Fortress Rochester, The Inside Story of the IBM iSeries''.

Books

*Soltis, Frank G. (1997). ''Inside the AS/400'', Duke Press. *Soltis, Frank G. (2001). ''Fortress Rochester: the Inside Story of the IBM iSeries'', NEWS/400 Books.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Soltis, Frank American computer scientists IBM employees Living people 1940 births