In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Luiz André Barroso of Google, where he drove transformation of hyperscale computing infrastructure and led engineering for key products like Google Maps. Luiz is a Google Fellow and Head of the Office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE), responsible for company-wide technical coordination. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Engineering in Google Maps and led the Core team, the group primarily responsible for the technical foundation behind Google's flagship products. Prior to Google, Luiz was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq, where his group did some of the pioneering work on multi-core architectures. He co-authored The Datacenter as a Computer, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems. Luiz is a Fellow of ACM and AAAS.
In the interview, Luiz looks back on growing up in Brazil, and how family played a part in his early affinity for electrical engineering which progressed to computer engineering. He recalls his master’s advisor, who stimulated his fascination in Local Area Networks and queuing theory, and how this got him interested in computer science. Luiz also talks about his first job in computing at IBM Research in Rio de Janeiro, and his PhD days at USC in Los Angeles, which got him involved in computer architecture and gave him an early taste of both research and practice in memory systems. He shares of his unique experiences in moving from hardware to software engineering at Google and from areas of high professional expertise to “areas of ignorance,” and how an engineering education prepared him to scale new heights.
