IBM’s winning streak in global innovation as measured in patents awarded reached a remarkable 21 years in 2013. And North Carolina’s connections to the honor are many.

More than 700, in fact.

Ed Suffern, a “senior engineer,” 1973 N.C. State graduate, and acknowledged “IBM Master Inventor” who is based in the Triangle, is one of the Big Blue innovators featured in the tech giant’s announcement today that it set another record for patents in 2013. Of 6,809 patents, more than 700 included participation by IBMers in the Tar Heel state.

“North Carolina inventors contributed more than 700 patents to IBM’s record total of 6,809 patents in 2014,” says IBM’s Christopher Andrews.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) chose to highlight one of Suffern’s co-inventions: “U.S. Patent #8,352,953: Dynamically Provisioning Virtual Machines,” which involves a solution to a vexing problem: handling demand in cloud computing environments. 

Given the explosion in demand for cloud computing and IBM’s huge investment in the “cloud” for data centers (such as a recently built one in RTP) as solutions, Suffern has a key, high-profile role.

Notes IBM in a blog posted about him today:

“Suffern is responsible for developing the architecture for IBM Intelligent Cluster solutions that provide fully tested high performance computing and cloud infrastructures to service a variety of customer applications.”

Big Blue also posted a YouTube video highlighting Suffern and his work. (It’s included with this blog post.)

Suffern is a 40-year IBM veteran who has focused on high performance computing solutions over the past four years. Discovering technology is not something new for him, however. According to IBM, he holds some 25 patents.

The Bio

Here’s his IBM Bio:

“Ed Suffern is a Senior Engineer at IBM working on the architecture and design of Intelligent Cluster solutions for high performance computing configurations. He started his career at IBM after graduating from NC State University in 1973. After working in IBM’s networking division in IBM for 25 years, he transitioned to working in the management architecture for IBM’s BladeCenter system. This work was followed by architecting and designing a remote workstation blade in collaboration with IBM locations in Japan, Taiwan, Kirkland, WA. He continued his career in the high performance computing arena where he has worked for the past four years. During his career, he was on assignment for six years at the IBM facility in LaGaude, France. Ed is an IBM Master Inventor and is currently on his 28th patent plateau. He has had 25 US Patent issued.

“Ed has been married for 39 years and has three sons and five grand children.”

Making “Cloud” Work

The featured patent:

“U.S. Patent #8,352,953: Dynamically Provisioning Virtual Machines – This invention solves the ‘noisy neighbor’ problem that reduces online system availability and constrains cloud computing network bandwidth when websites, such as online retailers or auction sites encounter unexpected dramatic spikes in demand.”

So what’s the patent all about?

“What the patented invention does is allow the provisioning manager to identify online hotspots where VMs [virtual machines] are taking up large amounts of bandwidth and then dynamically move them to another physical system where they’ll receive faster response times no matter how many users are accessing the server at the same time,” IBM explains in the blog.

Suffern told the IBM blogger that the problem his team addressed was one he and his team saw coming as cloud growth skyrocketed.

“We first recognized this issue three years ago when we were talking about potential areas of concern with virtual machines,” he said. “Although it wasn’t necessarily a problem users were facing at that time, we’re constantly thinking about things that could pose an issue in the future and developing solutions that help us avoid them. That’s how IBM maintains its leadership in the cloud space.”

Suffern also sees multiple applications for the invention.

“Take a sporting event or natural disaster, for example. Afterwards, there’s a flood of users trying to access news online in order to get the latest updates,” he said in the blog.

“Our solution allows a large number of users to access the same information at the same time without slowing response times. We move users to a different physical server that has identical information, and we do so seamlessly and dynamically so users have no idea they’re being moved.”

[IBM ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of IBM stories as reported in WRALTechWire.]