Gregory Michael Papadopoulos (born 1958) is an American engineer, computer scientist, executive, and venture capitalist. He is the creator and lead proponent for

Redshift In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and simultaneous increase in f ...

, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by

Moore's Law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empir ...

Biography

Papadopoulos received a

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

in systems science from the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

in 1979, and an S.M. and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

electrical engineering and computer science Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is an academic program at many universities which comprises scientific and engineering aspects of computing. CSE is also a term often used in Europe to translate the name of engineering informatics academic ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) in 1983 and 1988. At some time he held positions at

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

and

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

. While a graduate student, he worked at the MIT spinoff

PictureTel PictureTel Corporation, often shortened to PictureTel Corp., was one of the first commercial videoconferencing product companies. It achieved peak revenues of over $490 million in 1996 and 1997 and was eventually acquired by Polycom in October ...

in its early days. His dissertation was on a

dataflow architecture Dataflow architecture is a dataflow-based computer architecture that directly contrasts the traditional von Neumann architecture or control flow architecture. Dataflow architectures have no program counter, in concept: the executability and executi ...

microprocessor, under his advisor

Arvind Arvind (from sa, अरविन्द ') is a common Indian given name, Indian masculine name meaning Nelumbo nucifera, lotus. The name is of Hindu origin. Its variants include Aravind, Aravinda, Aravindan, and Aurobindo (). Meaning ' means ...

. Along with David E. Culler, he developed a simplified approach to dataflow execution in a project named Monsoon. Papadopoulos became assistant professor at MIT in 1988 and associate professor in May 1993. He helped start Ergo Computing in 1988, and

Exa Corporation Exa Corporation was a developer and distributor of computer-aided engineering (CAE) software. Its main product was PowerFLOW, a lattice-boltzmann derived implementation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which can very accurately simulate int ...

in 1991. He was chief architect at

Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the ...

starting in 1992. His research applied

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...

techniques to

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

. He joined

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

in September 1994. After serving as chief scientist for the server division, in December 1995 he became chief technical officer (CTO) of SMCC (Sun's hardware division), and CTO of the entire company in April 1998. He left Sun in February 2010. Papadopoulos co-authored (with David Douglas and John Boutelle) the book ''Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering'', published in 2009. At the time he lived in

Los Gatos, California Los Gatos (, ; ) is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area just southwest of San Jose in the foothills of the ...

. In 2010 Papadopoulos joined the

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

firm

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...

(NEA) as an executive in residence and the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

as a director. In April, 2011, Papadopoulos became a partner at NEA. At some time, he was chairman of the board of trustees for the

SETI Institute The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization incorporated in 1984 whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to use this knowledge to inspire and guide present and futu ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Papadopoulos, Greg Living people Sun Microsystems people University of California, San Diego alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni MIT School of Engineering faculty American chief technology officers American business executives American people of Greek descent 1958 births