Greg Papadopoulos finds greatness in architecture

For years, Sun has been saying, “The network is the computer.” Last year, CTO and Executive Vice President Greg Papadopoulos put a key part of that concept into practice with its N1 system architecture. Deployed at more than 100 customer sites, including Cingular and DaimlerChrysler, the distributed and dynamically provisioned computing architecture is a step forward in harnessing the data power of disparate computers and giving critical applications priority.

Papadopoulos’ work will also take the industry one step closer to the concept of grid or utility computing. “The greatest CTOs that I know are the ones that take architecture seriously,” he says, a 2003 InfoWorld Innovator. “Architecture guides the constraints and shows what’s important and what isn’t. It bridges the creativity of the engineer to something that can achieve a high impact for the company.”