Stephen Fried Email & Phone Number

Plymouth, Ma, Us

In 1980 I found a book which enabled me to reverse engineer Z-80 based microcomputers. In late 1981 I bought an IBM-PC and used the same methodology to reverse engineer the IBM-PC software which enabled me to employ an Intel 8087 to accelerate the simulations I was running at PSI. I approached management with a software product idea, and when they decided not to pursue my idea, I founded Microway with my wife Ann, and then wrote the software tools that enabled scientists and engineers to recompile their Fortran applications on the PC, accelerating them by a factor of 10 or more using Intel math coprocessors. At a point in time when we were Intel's sixth largest customer, we developed and marketed the first 32-bit compilers to run on a PC, giving users full access to the 4 GB address space of the 80386 for the first time. At the suggestion of Clevel Moler, the author of MATLAB, I wrote a protected mode graphics library that made it possible for dozens of ISVs to port their VAX codes to the PC. As a former ham radio enthusiast and experimental physicist, I managed the design of roughly 100 hardware products that included PC accelerators, PC coprocessor cards, motherboards and most recently InfiniBand Switches and HCAs. During this period I was heavily involved with compiler optimization methods in addition to writing kernels for the Intel i860 Vector Processor and Alpha. Over the years we extended our compiler family which included a C and PASCAL, to the i860, PowerPC and DEC Alpha. I have always been heavily involved in strategic planning and helped to write the ads that made it possible for scientists and engineers to understand what our products did while writing articles on code generation for Dr. Dobbs and BYTE. Most recently I have been perfecting the use of water cooled Loop Heat Pipes to cool servers in data centers, a technology which can provide "Free Cooling," even in hot climates, dramatically reducing the energy consumption of data centers.

Andover, Ma, Us

Developed software modules in BASIC used to carry out simulations of devices like fuel cell power plants that were run on Microcomputers and sold to DOE. Managed a project which employed an Ammonia Rankine Bottoming Cycle to improve the efficiency of a 12 MW fuel cell power plant. Six years ago this work lead me to the discovery of Ammonia Loop Heat Pipes, devices used to cool electronics in space vehicles. I participated and funded research that lead to the development of Copper Water Loop Heat Pipes capable of cooling devices that reject up to 1000 Watts/cm2!

Owned and operated a "hobby business" that eventually became so busy, that Ann and I were forced to leave our positions in Boston and go full time with Yankee Aviation. We started off as a glider flight school but eventually morphed into an aircraft flight school, maintenance and charter operation that operated out of Plymouth MA as well as several mountain sites in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Member of the Atomic and Laser Physics Groups. Dick (J.R.) Airey and I invented the first HF chemical laser to run on a ground state transition. We used it to excite HF in a cell and measure the vibrational relaxation rate at room temperature, which turned out to be very fast, just 100 collisions. Dick then went back to England and I measured this rate up to 1000 K. Our experimental method was copied within a year and our surprising results verified by over a dozen other research groups. Another interesting experiment I did with Kurt Wray for which I also did the theoretical work needed to explain our results, demonstrated that the Oxygen Schuman-Runge system was in thermodynamic equilibrium at a temperature of 3,000K. The experiment was carried out with the labs 1 atmosphere arc, a device originally designed to investigate the ablation properties of materials used in heat shields. This work was done before the depletion of Ozone in the upper atmosphere was detected. This system of bands in absorption is responsible for the production of atomic Oxygen in the Earth's upper atmosphere which feeds the production of Ozone.

Designed and built a magnetically suspended molecular beam velocity selector: essentially a high speed turbine that sits in a vacuum turning at 30,000 RPM that allows molecules with a particular speed to pass through slots in its periphery. The task involved designing an amplifier that drove a 20,000 turn electro magnet along with a position sensor that drove a pre-amplifier that provided phase controlled feed back to the magnet that kept the rotor suspended in a particular position.

Started out simulating a clever undergraduate for Professor Mike Feiring, who was thinking about teaching a course in Fortran to undergraduates at Harvard. The group reported to the Kennedy White House and employed Operations Research to solve water resource problems in countries like Pakistan. While learning how to employ Fortran II to program the university's IBM 7094, I learned a little bit about civil engineering writing simulations of water treatment plants, setting up queuing theory models of things like the pediatrics ward at Boston City Hospital and employed linear programming methods to optimizing solutions. Towards the end, I invented a new paradigm for minimizing very non-linear objective functions that were subject to linear constraints, that did a better job of discovering the ideal operating modes of a cation-anion exchanger at Oak Ridge.

As attendee, my job was to work with senior scientists that predominantly came from Cornell, Harvard and MIT along with teachers who were interested in developing new curricula for teaching science in K-6. With the well known biologist Lynn (Sagan) Margulis, and the future photographer Elsa Dorfman, I developed the materials for the best selling unit, "From Peas to Particles," to come out of the Elementary Science Study. The unit was initially intended to teach 5th graders how Euglena replicated and required the students to understand how dilution could be used to study populations of Euglena as they replicated. What the unit actually did was teach youngsters how to deal with large numbers as well as counting methods.

Took a two week course in Radiation Safety, then went to work in the field, monitoring radiation at prior GZ's and recent GZ's that were still "hot." Observed the Sudan event from check point two, which produced a very large crater at the test site. Was involved in managing a pair of emergency evacuations immediately after tests when wind direction changed, blowing radioactive gases back on workers coring into the resulting crater.

Continued helping friends of an uncle in the Physics department carry out tasks like searching for the beam, while hobbing a sidereal worm gear for the polar mount I made the previous summer. The machine shop skills I picked up at Cornell would stand me in good stead the rest of my life. One of the first acquisitions we made when we decided to explore Loop Heat Pipe production methods was a CNC mill.

Helped friends of an uncle in the physics department modify their experiments while being taught how to use the staff shop, which I used to machine a polar mount for the 8 inch Newtonian mirrors I ground at home in the winter.

Ba, Physics

Bassoon, Music Theory And Ensemble Performance