John Wilkes

John Wilkes is an HP Fellow leading research into enterprise-scale storage systems, with a particular emphasis on their design and management.

He joined HP Laboratories in 1982, initially to work on the PA-RISC processor architecture, and then participated in or led a number of distributed operating system projects. He started work in storage systems in 1988 with the DataMesh project, and has been active in that area ever since.

Since 1995 he has been the technical lead and group manager of the Storage Systems Program, conducting research into storage systems that can manage themselves. In mid-2000, he turned the management reins over to a colleague so that he could spend more of his time on technical work in this area.

Wilkes has published on a wide range of technical topics, including his PhD thesis work on a novel graphics display (which won both the British Computer Society's Technology Award in 1982, and the Wilkes award in 1984 for the paper about it); high-speed networking (Hamlyn); and storage systems -- including disk array architectures such as HP AutoRAID, AFRAID, and TickerTAIP and most recently, self-managing storage systems.

He has served as a technical conference program committee member on several occasions, including most recently the January 2002 File and Storage Technology (FAST) conference, and he was the program chair for the 1999 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). He is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.

Wilkes received a BA and MA in natural sciences (1978 and 1980), a Diploma in computer science (1979) and a PhD in computer science (1984), all from the University of Cambridge. He has held an adjunct Associate Professor appointment at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) since 1996, and is a Fellow of the ACM.

He serves on the Technical Council of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and was awarded a SNIA Outstanding Contribution award in 2001 for his development of the SNIA Shared Storage Model. Wilkes is named as inventor or co-inventor on about 25 patent applications, eight of which have been granted so far.