April 18, 2005
Computer scientist Darrell Long appointed
to the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems
By Tim Stephens
UCSC has appointed Darrell Long, professor of computer science,
to the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems. Long
is the first faculty member to hold the endowed chair, established
in 2004 with a $1 million gift from Kumar Malavalli, cofounder
of Brocade Communications and cofounder and CEO of InMage Systems.
Darrell Long has an international
reputation as a leader in storage systems research.
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Long directs the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) at
UCSC and also serves as associate dean for research and graduate
studies in UCSC's Jack Baskin School of Engineering.
He said the funds from the endowed chair would provide support
for research, graduate students, and other activities of the
SSRC, a leading center for research on data storage and storage
systems.
"I see this endowment as recognition for the excellence
of the research conducted by the SSRC as a whole. The center
will benefit greatly from having this permanent source of support,"
Long said.
The mission of the SSRC is to improve the performance and profitability
of the data storage industry through a strong focus on the software
and systems aspects of data storage. Research in the SSRC focuses
on caching, storage systems hierarchies, peta-scale storage
systems, distributed storage systems, and security and performance.
Data storage technology has come to play a crucial role in
modern society, as everything from business information to medical
and financial records for individuals is stored on computers
and must be available for efficient and secure access. The sheer
volume of digital reference data that must be stored and accessed
is increasing dramatically. Data storage makes headlines when
criminals break into databases and obtain the personal information
of thousands of people. But security is just one of many technical
challenges in the area of storage systems.
Malavalli has made major contributions in storage systems and
storage area networks. He was for many years the chief technical
officer of Brocade Communications, the leading provider of storage
area networking infrastructure, which he cofounded in 1995.
He is also one of the principal architects of Fibre Channel
technology, a high-speed data transfer technology used in storage
networks. In 2003, Malavalli was inducted into the Silicon Valley
Engineering Council Hall of Fame for his contributions to technology.
Long's appointment to the Malavalli Chair is for a five-year
term. He has an international reputation as a leader in storage
systems research, with more than 120 research publications and
numerous patents related to storage systems.
Long has broad research interests in the area of computing
systems, including operating systems, distributed systems, high-performance
storage systems, fault tolerance, performance evaluation, and
mobile computing. His research is supported by the National
Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other agencies,
as well as by various industry partners. He has received an
IBM Faculty Award and several IBM Research Invention Achievement
Awards.
A senior member of the Computer Society of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Long served as
chair of the society's Technical Committee on Operating Systems
and now serves on the Executive Committee. He is a member of
the Association for Computing Machinery and serves as chair
of the Scholars Committee for the Usenix Association. Long earned
a B.S. in computer science from San Diego State University and
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from UC San Diego.
He joined the UCSC faculty in 1988.
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