Luiz André Barroso

      Luiz André Barroso

Bio

I am a Google Fellow, the company's top technical title, and in my latest role I was responsible for company-wide technical coordination, leading the office of Cross-Google Engineering (xGE).
In over two decades at Google I have worked as a VP of Engineering in the Core and Maps divisions, and as the technical leader in areas such as search and the design of Google‘s computing platform. I have authored well cited research articles in a range of computer science topics and I co-wrote The Datacenter as a Computer, the canonical textbook on the computing infrastrucure behind major online services. I am dedicated to improving representation and inclusion in our field, and I have served as the executive sponsor for Google's Latinx employee group. Before Google I was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq, where our group did some of the pioneering research on modern multi-core microprocessors.
I enjoy observing and photographing wildlife. Since 2022 I have been a member of the board of directors of the Rainforest Trust, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of critical wildlife habitats worldwide.
Music has been a lifelong passion. I've had the chance to accompany my wife, singer and songwriter Catherine Warner, on guitar, and I have recorded an album of American and Brazilian songs from the 30s to the 50s (Before Bossa), alongside two of the most respected Brazilian musicians of our time: Zeca Assumpção (bass) and Sergio Reze (drums).
I am a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I am a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and I was the recipient of the 2020 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Eckert Mauchly award (the highest honor in the field of Computer Architecture). From 2013-2019 I have served on the US National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.
I hold B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Professional service

I have a limited time budget for external professional activities but have enjoyed many opportunities to work with the academic comunity and other professional organizations.

Committees and Boards

Between 2013 and 2019 I served as a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, a division of the National Research Council

Program chair of ACM ISCA 2009

Serving at the ASPLOS 2016 program committee; having previously served at PCs for ASPLOS'08, ISCA ('01, '02, '05, '06, '07, '09), SBAC-PAD ('01, '03, '06), PACT'04, ICS ('02, '03), IEEE Top Picks in Computer Architecture, 2008.

Serving at the steering committee of the NSF Workshop on Sustainable Data Centers; having previously served on steering committees for ISCA 2010 and ISCA 2011

Invited talks

Lectures at Columbia, Duke, USC, U. Edinburgh, UT Austin, Imperial College, Cambridge University, Harvard University, U. Michigan, UPC, Stanford University, UC Berkeley

Keynote talks at SOCC'16, PLDI'16, FCRC'11, SIGMOD'10, ASPLOS'09, ISLPED'08, IISWC'06, SBAC-PAD'03

National Academy of Engineering's Gilbreth Lectureship, 2012

See list of talks here

Select press articles

Popular Science named the COVID-19 Exposure Notification Technology co-developed by Google and Apple the Innovation of the Year in 2020.

Wired magazine has writen an article about our latest StreetView cars and related computer vision technology. The accompanying video featuring some of my colleagues is worth a watch.

A 2012 Wired article interviews me on the concept of Warehouse Computing.

Wired has written other articles on our work at Google, including one on datacenters and a profile of my colleagues Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Urs Hoelzle and me.

Other

I play guitar and bass guitar in Catherine Warner's new album, Loss and Found.

In 2020 I received the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award, given by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society for pioneering the design of warehouse-scale computing and driving it from concept to industry.

As technical lead of the Google Platforms team between 2010-2015, I started a project aimed at hardware acceleration of machine learning applications which resulted in the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom ASIC that powers several ML systems at Google, including image understanding from Street View.

I wrote the foreword for the 5th edition of Hennessy & Patterson's Computer Architecture: A quantitative approach, the classic textbook on computer architecture which was first printed when I was a graduate student.

Co-authored the NRC report: The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?, which describes how underlying circuit technology is no longer yielding the year-over-year improvements we have been accustomed to since Moore's law was "enacted", and what that means to the future of computing.

A short essay on innovation that I wrote for an internal Google audience was subsequently published in Google's re:Work blog. See The Roofshot Manifesto. It was then added to the 2nd edition of E.Schmidt's and J.Rosenberg's How Google Works.

I co-wrote the official SIGARCH/TCCA best practices document for ISCA program chairs.

I was the guest co-editor of IEEE Micro Jul/Aug 2010 special issue on Datacenter-scale Computing

Computer Architecture meets Architecture in a column Urs and I wrote for the Architecture publication CLOG

Contact

lab at my last name, dot org

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043