Why Archaea?

I’ll answer your question with a question: “What can 1,024 rabbits do that two strong oxen cannot?”

It’s good practice for small businesspeople – even sole proprietors – to create corporate entities to serve as counterparties to their contracts and serve as financial conduits. So when it came time to name my LLC, I wanted to allude to the types of parallel programming that define my career. Amidst that exercise, Seymour Cray’s rhetorical question came to mind: "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: two strong oxen or 1,024 chickens?" A legendary supercomputer designer, Cray had long resisted the calls to increase compute performance through massive parallelism (an idea that he reportedly revisited in the 1990s, before the term GPU had even been coined), preferring to design powerful single-threaded processors.

Of course, it’s not hard to think of tasks that 1,024 chickens would excel at in comparison to two oxen, no matter how strong. Taking that idea to its extreme, I decided to name my LLC after microorganisms, namely the cyanobacterial architects of our atmosphere.

And, I hasten to point out, there are no known Archaeal pathogens.