Mike Vildibil
TRAILBLAZER
Building computer systems for the future
Mike Vildibil
Vice President , Product Management , Qualcomm Technologies
Mike Vildibil , Vice President General Manager for the Cloud , Edge , AI business unit at Qualcomm has a history of building very large data centre supercomputer complexes . With this wealth of knowledge and expertise , Vildibil and his team have been involved with the design of many of the largest computers in the world .
“ We ' ve been driving some of the highest and highest performance supercomputers in the world ,” he explained .
Looking back over his career journey , Vildibil explains “ it ' s a good example of the reality of where many of the leading edge technology jobs are going and what skill sets you need to go there , especially in a leadership position .”
Having also worked in the academic community , Vildibil has had the opportunity to learn and grow in different working environments : “ I began my journey working for a supercomputer company , it was the leader in building supercomputers . I actually started out as an employee of the University of California , San Diego . And my job was to lead a team that bought one of these $ 40 million computers and operated it ,” he said .
In this role , Vildibil provided computational services to the research community who were doing things like drug discovery , cancer research and global warming research .
“ This was the beginning of what really took off to be the third leg of just scientific discovery . It has become a fundamental element to how science is conducted today as is doing a lot of it in computers . In doing so , I became very involved in research programmes , I was a researcher at UCSD where I wrote my own grant proposals and did fundamental research for the national science foundation and others ,” Vildibil commented .
20 December 2021