Sysadmin on the iWarp Supercomputer Project and Bringing the Internet to Intel Oregon

The iWarp Supercomputing Mission

• The iWarp was an ambitious DARPA-backed joint development between Intel and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
• The goal was to build a revolutionary systolic array supercomputer-on-a-chip capable of massive fine-grained parallel processing, competing aggressively with contemporary high-end processor designs like early Pentiums in raw computational capability.
• I served as the sysadmin for a dedicated team of approximately 20 chip design engineers under Seth Bradley, managing a fleet of Sun Microsystems Unix workstations across Intel's Jones Farm and Hawthorn Farm campuses.

Bringing the Internet to Intel Oregon (Intel's 2nd Direct Link)

• Because the project was a DARPA/government-funded collaboration with CMU researchers in Pittsburgh, the engineering team required direct, real-time connectivity to the DARPA/Internet network.
• At that time, Intel had only one direct Internet connection in the entire company—located at headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
• I spearheaded establishing Intel's second direct Internet connection, linking the Oregon campus to the global Internet via a dedicated 56k leased line.
• While 56k sounds tiny today, in 1989–1990 it was a vital lifeline. I coordinated extensively with the Santa Clara networking group to route traffic and bring direct TCP/IP Internet services to the Hillsboro team.

Transition to Network Administration at Hawthorn Farm

• After roughly a year on iWarp, I transitioned into broader network and systems administration roles across Hawthorn Farm, managing Unix environments and network infrastructure.
• This deep familiarity with Intel's internal network and security topologies eventually set the stage for the 1993 security audit and the ensuing legal case.