It's fitting that one of Wall Street's top computer jocks isn't considered a high-tech visionary. This isn't Silicon Valley, after all. It's New York.

Colleagues describe Steve Neiman, a VP who runs high-performance computing for investment banking at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., as "low key," "modest," and "probing." Neiman, who helped pioneer the use of grid computing on Wall Street, has a doctorate in physics, experience at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and "distinguished engineer" in his title. But "he's not chasing technology rainbows," says Songnian Zhou, chief technology officer at grid-computing software maker Platform Computing Inc., a key supplier. Neiman's a pragmatist at heart. (Hey, he lives on Staten Island, a lower-wattage alternative to Manhattan.)

	ON READING: Neiman says he's one of the few on Wall Street who's read 13th-century German literature for fun

"We're not building the compute backbone because it's cool," Neiman says of the grid-computing project his group uses to manage complex trading and risk-management applications. The system culls data from across the company's investment-banking operations to help bankers execute trades that hedge against different types of business risk for clients.

Grid computing, which matches users over networks with the processing power and databases they need to complete specific jobs, isn't widely used in business, but Neiman says it lets his group get answers faster and keep costs down. The backbone separates the state of computations from the Linux servers that run them, and nodes that fail are rebooted or replaced--never fixed. The servers are "dirt cheap, dumb as dirt, and incredibly disposable," Neiman says.

J.P. Morgan Chase faces its share of challenges, including a slowdown in investment banking, vulnerability to credit risk, and more than $2 billion of exposure to Enron. But it's a leader in high-performance computing. The company won the NCSA's annual Industrial Grand Challenge award in 1997 for its work in data visualization. "It was a shock to a lot of people" that an investment bank was using supercomputers, says John Stevenson, marketing director for the center's private-sector program and Neiman's manager when he worked there in the '90s. But "Steve would never take credit," he says. "It's not his style."
--Aaron Ricadela