Bio

Dr. Rich Wolski is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc.  Having received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Davis (while a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Tennessee, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Rich has led several national scale research efforts in the area of distributed systems and is the progenitor of the Eucalyptus open source cloud project.

Research

The goal of my research is to explore ways in which the ubiquitous proliferation of high-performance network connectivity can be used to foster new distributed computing capabilities and systems.  My approach focuses on the development of highly adaptive distributed services and applications that can use resources (machines, storage systems, visualization systems, etc.) which are interconnected by a shared and fluctuating network. By adapting to the performance fluctuations caused by contention and unexpected resource failure, distributed services can deliver better client response, and distributed user applications can dynamically optimize their execution ``on-the-fly''.  Such resource-aware services and applications are keystones of cloud computing -- A web services based approach to building seamless, highly-scalable distributed systems.  My work in this burgeoning research area attempts to investigate and define the foundations upon which adaptive system components and applications can be built.

Honors and Awards

• Named to Top-10 Cloud Pioneers List by Information Week, November, 2012
• Winner of the Cloud Camp Cloud Hero Award, March, 2012
• Winner of Best Cloud Innovation Award, Cloudies Awards, December 2008
• Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year (co-winner), University of California, Santa Barbara, Computer Science Program, June, 2008
• Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year, University of California, Santa Barbara, Computer Engineering Program, June, 2006
• Academic Senate University Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 2005
• ACM Teacher of the Year award, Computer Science Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN., May 2000
• Best Acceleration for ``Where do you want to Compute Today?'' at the High-performance Computing Challenge, SC98, Orlando FL, November 1998