Attention NAE Members
Starting June 30, 2023, login credentials have changed for improved security. For technical assistance, please contact us at 866-291-3932 or helpdesk@nas.edu. For all other inquiries, please contact our Membership Office at 202-334-2198 or NAEMember@nae.edu.
Click here to login if you're an NAE Member
Recover Your Account Information
This is the 28th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy...
This is the 28th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy carries out the responsibilities for which it was established in 1964.
Under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering was formed as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. Members are elected on the basis of significant contributions to engineering theory and practice and to the literature of engineering or on the basis of demonstrated unusual accomplishments in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology. The National Academies share a responsibility to advise the federal government on matters of science and technology. The expertise and credibility that the National Academy of Engineering brings to that task stem directly from the abilities, interests, and achievements of our members and international members, our colleagues and friends, whose special gifts we remember in this book.
Results Found
BY JEFF DEAN, SANJAY GHEMAWAT, AND URS HÖLZLE
LUIZ ANDRÉ BARROSO, an extraordinary colleague and friend who helped shape Google as we know it today, passed away on Sept. 16, 2023.
Luiz’s contributions to the field of computer science are immense. In the 1990s, while at DEC, he was one of a handful of researchers designing the first multi-core central processing units (CPUs), work that influenced the design of every modern processor. He later joined Google, where he pioneered the design of warehouse-scale computers and improved datacenter energy efficiency. His work laid the foundation for the entire hyperscale industry, and many of his papers are considered essential reading for aspiring systems designers, including Web Search for a Planet1 The Case for Energy Proportionality,2 The Tail at Scale,3 and Attack of the Killer Microseconds.4 He was also the lead author of The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines (with Urs Hölzle and Parthasarathy Ranganathan; Springer, 2022), widely used as the de facto textbook in the field.
Over the past decade, Luiz continued to shape Google’s direction. He led the Geo team – including Google Maps, Earth, and Earth Engine – before founding the Core software platforms team. He also collaborated on the development of novel privacy-preserving smartphone protocols for COVID-19 contact tracing, helping prevent hundreds of thousands of cases and saving lives worldwide.
His work has been widely recognized. He was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2020, he won the ACM/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Eckert-Mauchly Award, the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award, for “pioneering the design of warehouse-scale computing and driving it from concept to industry.”
Luiz was much more than a computer scientist. He was an avid nature photographer and an accomplished guitar player who just recently completed an album with musical legends Zeca Assumpção and Sergio Reze.
To learn more about Luiz, visit barroso.org. We especially recommend reading the reflections he shared after receiving the Eckert-Mauchly Award5 or watching the video of his award lecture,6 which includes fascinating images of the early servers and datacenters he helped build.
We remember Luiz as perhaps the kindest person we have known. He brought a gentle spirit and joy to everything he did. We will miss his smiling face and positive energy. Working with him was just fun, even when the work itself was hard or stressful. Luiz is deeply missed by us and by many friends and colleagues across Google and the broader computer science community.
________________________ 1Barroso LA, Dean J., Hölzle U. 2003. Web search for a planet: The Google cluster architecture. IEEE Micro 23(2):22-8. 2Barroso LA, Hölzle U. 2007. The case for energy-proportional computing. Computer 40(12):33-7. 3Dean J, Barroso LA. 2013. The tail at scale. Communications of the ACM 56(2):74-80. 4Barroso L, Marty M, Patterson D, Ranganathan P. 2017. Attack of the killer microseconds. Communications of the ACM 60(4):48-54. 5https://lnkd.in/gFqFY-Bt 6https://lnkd.in/gFdqGmpD