ROCHESTER, Minn. (KTTC) -- IBM is celebrating 20 years of leadership when it comes to topping the list of annual patents. With more than 500 this year, Rochester IBMers are leading the way in innovation.
Charles Archer is just one of many master inventors at IBM. He's in charge of pushing the limit when it comes to technology. Archer has about 150 patents to his name, many of them focused on the networking of supercomputers, like Blue Gene Q.
Master Invention and Senior Software Engineer Charles Arches says, "This machine has over 6 million processes involved in it. Getting all of those processes to communicate with each other requires some new and exciting technology that we have to innovate to be able to do."
He's working on cutting-edge technology saying, "It puts the thinking in the hands of the computer rather than the scientist."
Creating computers that do work we as humans, cannot.
Archer explains, "Government customers use this for nuclear stockpile stewardship which is simulating and designing nuclear weapons which we can no longer test."
So just how does one constantly come up with new ideas? There's usually a need for it to begin with.
He says, "I would say that the majority of the patents and the ideas that we get come from problems that customers don't know what to do or don't have a good solution for something. We have to come up with new ways to do things."
And just as the saying goes, where there's a will there's a way.
Archer says, "One thing that the computing industry has taught me is that nothing is really impossible."
As Archer looks to the future, he says there's no doubt years down the road there will be something new, just as impressive.
Company-wide, IBM received nearly 6,500 patents and about 530 came from people working in Rochester.
