Dr. Garth Gibson,
CTO Panasas & Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University
Garth Gibson Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept and Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
I joined the faculty of CMU's Computer Science Department in 1991. Previously I received a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1991 and 1987, respectively, from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to Berkeley, I received a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in 1983 from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
In 1993 I founded CMU's Parallel Data Laboratory (PDL) and led it until April 1999. Today the PDL is led by Greg Ganger. The PDL is a community that typically comprises between 3 to 6 faculty, 1 to 2 dozen students and 4 to 10 staff. It receives support and guidance from a consortium of 10 to 20 companies with interests in storage systems, the Parallel Data Consortium. This community holds biannual retreats and workshops to exchange technology ideas, analysis and future directions. The publications of the PDL are available for your inspection.
The principal contributions of my last twenty years of research Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), Informed Prefetching and Caching (TIP) and Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD), now an ANSI SCSI command set standard (OSD), have all stimulated derivative research and development in academia and industry. RAID, in particular, is now the organizing concept of a 10+ billion-dollar marketplace (more on RAID in my 1995 RAID tutorial).
In 1999 I started Panasas Inc., a scalable storage cluster company using an object storage architecture and providing 100s of TB of high-performance storage in a single management domain for national laboratory, energy sector, auto/aero-design, life sciences, financial modeling, digital animation, and engineering design markets.
In 2006 I founded a Petascale Data Storage Institute (PDSI) for the Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC). Led by CMU, with partners at Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, this Institute gathers together leading experts in leadership class supercomputing storage systems to address the challenges involved in moving from today's terascale computers to the petascale computers of the next decade.