Rick Lytel recently served as Sun Microsystems' Vice President and Chief Technologist of Physical and Life Sciences, and as Vice President and Founder of Sun's Advanced System Development Center, where he led teams designing next-generation high-throughput SPARC multiprocessor systems. Prior to that, he founded Sun's Physical Sciences Center and developed packaging, cooling, signaling, optics, and dynamical system monitoring and control technologies. Rick also drove Sun's company-wide thrust in high availability systems. Prior to joining Sun, Rick co-founded several optical device companies and became a recognized leader in optical technologies for computers and communication systems. He was adjunct Professor of graduate physics at Washington State University from 1993-2002. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia, has organized and run many conferences, and has published extensively in his career, mostly in the field of integrated and nonlinear optics, optical devices, and optical interconnects, his specialty for over a decade.