HOW PREPARED ARE YOU
Colin Parris, Ph.D. Vice President for Software Research GE Global Research
C
olin Parris ’85, Electrical Engineering, Howard University, is one of the greatest data economy evangelists on the planet. One of his proudest accomplishments is his role in the Blue Gene Supercomputer business. But long before supercomputer projects for highperformance system-on-a-chip architecture, Parris was an emerging leader in the world of digital convergence. “When I first began at Howard, I was focused on electrical engineering, and then this thing called software suddenly showed up,” he recalled.
“People were always building processors and chips and electronic circuits to solve a problem, but software enables you to reconfigure the electronic circuit very quickly so that you can have the circuit do other things on top of a processor,” he explained. Parris fell in love with software at Howard. His electrical engineering degree course not only introduced him to BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction) and Pascal, it gave him a ready network—students and professors—and taught him how to learn, which comes in handy considering the rate and pace at which Internet of Things (IoT) technologies he is involved in develop. He also learned the difference between simply writing code and architecting code. “If you’re just going to write code, yeah that’s interesting, but can you write effective code? Can you write code that’s secure? Can you write code that’s flexible?” Federal funding of computer science education helps people understand how things work together and create the building blocks that change the world, Parris said. “In the early days at Berkeley, the university became well known for BSD UNIX,” he said. “That operating system was created by AT&T, but it came out of a program at MIT funded by the U.S. government. They found Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), which became UNIX and then UNIX came to Berkeley and Bill Joy took that program and founded the Solaris operating system.” Joy played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley. Today, nearly all operating systems are heavily influenced by Multics, through
by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
6 USBE&IT | DIGITAL ISSUE 2017
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