Fred J. Ziecina is a consultant/writer of the Lemaire Patent Law Firm with expertise in the areas of computer hardware and software architecture, I/O architecture, RISC (reduced instruction set computers) systems, real-time/event-based systems, event driven architecture, clustering and high availability, parallel processing, virtualization, storage subsystems and networking.

Fred received his undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago (B.S. in Engineering, With Highest Honors, 1974) with an emphasis on computer architecture, graphics processing and real-time processing. Fred received his graduate degree from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (M.S.E.E., 1981). His thesis topic was programming language specific processor instruction set enhancements.

Fred was a Senior Technical Staff member with IBM. He joined IBM in 1974 in Rochester, Minnesota, doing hardware and microcode development for I/O attachments. For much of his career Fred has been involved in overall system architecture and design. He has had a wide variety of responsibilities that have included: system and I/O architecture, hardware and microcode design and implementation, computer graphics, system and CPU performance analysis, and teaching ? within IBM and at Rochester Community College.

In 1999, Fred became part of a small team in IBM?s Systems and Technology Group that studied emerging, potentially disruptive technologies, providing server design guidance for all of IBM?s server development. His focus areas included: software stacks and server workload evolution, event driven architectures, virtualization (server and storage), accelerators (chip, card and appliance level), power management, systems management, open source, ERP solutions and deployments in scale-up/scale-out environments, business intelligence, and GRID computing.

Fred is co-inventor on 8 patents held by IBM. Subjects cover distributed data management, control flow and message passing protocols. Fred is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

For recreation, Fred spends a lot of time outdoors, biking and hiking in summer, and snowshoeing in winter. He is an avid photographer, enjoys listening to all types of music, playing guitar, woodworking, and reading (a lot of science fiction).