Innovation drives progress in today’s world

David Emberson

HPE Senior Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard Labs Hewlett Packard Enterprise

As a student at MIT's Digital Systems Laboratory, David Emberson constructed one of the earliest portable computers in 1975.

He joined Prime Computer in 1977, where he started the ECL program, developed some pioneering CAD tools, and was responsible for several CPU designs, including the Prime 550-II. He was named Prime's youngest senior engineer at age 22.

In the early 1980s, David built the world's first multiprocessor Unix system and the largest network of Berkeley Unix systems in the world, which became a central Usenet hub. In 1986-1987 he worked with Prof. Charles Seitz to develop a commercial variant of the Caltech Cosmic Cube.

David joined Sun Microsystems in 1988, where he contributed to the SPARC architecture, formed a collaboration with Xerox PARC that resulted in the SparcCenter 2000 and SparcServer 1000 systems, and managed the SparcStation 10 and SparcStation 20 workstation projects.

David joined the group, which became Sun Labs in 1995. There he built the first commercial 1 Gbps CMOS series, Sun's first packet-switched NUMA multiprocessor system, and the S-Chip VLIW processor-in-memory (PIM). As a Senior Director in Sun Labs, he was awarded Sun's Chairman's Award for Innovation in 2002 and was a key contributor to Sun's winning DARPA HPCS proposal in 2003.

David has consulted for the HyperTransport Consortium, AMD, Intel, Atheros, Pathscale, Qlogic, and several startup companies. He wrote the specification for HyperTransport HTX^TM, designed InfiniBand HCAs for PathScale, was a member of the InfiniBand Technical Working Group, implemented a number of embedded solutions for clients in areas ranging from robotics to automotive applications, and designed SSDs for Virident, Intel, and Graphite Systems (later acquired by EMC).

David joined HPE in 2016. As a member of the HPC Advanced Technologies team, David has led R&D programs for the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Program. He participates in the CXL Consortium technical working groups and is a member of the JEDEC 42.2 high-bandwidth memory (HBM) standards group.

David holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT and is the author of The Kindle Cookbook, which has sold over 80,000 copies. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. His principal interests are HPC system architecture and memory systems. He holds nineteen patents.