Frank Soltis


Frank Gerald Soltis, an American computer scientist, was IBM's Chief Scientist for the System i computers. Based on his PhD research, his pioneering architecture of technology-independent machine interfaces and single-level stores has appeared in these eight generations of IBM hardware: System/38 in 1978, the CISC AS/400 in 1988, the RISC AS/400 in 1995, the web server AS/400e in 1999, the eServer iSeries, the System i5, the System i, and IBM Power Systems running IBM i.

Career

In 1968, Soltis completed his PhD in electrical engineering from Iowa State University. 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 PowerPC architecture; the Amazon architecture is implemented by the RS64, POWER4, 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 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, a high availability and disaster recovery solutions provider in IBM Power Systems markets, 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