The Mark Weiser Award was created in 2001 by ACM SIGOPS to be given to an individual who has demonstrated creativity and innovation in operating systems research. The award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC. The award committee for 2022 consisted of Yuanyuan Zhou, Eddie Kohler, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau.
The winner of the 2022 SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award is
David Andersen
From the nominations letters:
“Dave Andersen has repeatedly shown how to extract impressive performance improvements by deeply understanding key low-level details in components and understanding how they interact with one another. The solutions he has developed are noteworthy for how simple they are, in retrospect. To a systems engineer and researcher, simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve and Dave’s projects show how to cut through complex details and arrive at simple, dramatic improvements. Examples of this include resilient overlay networks (SOSP 2001), efficient distributed learning with parameter servers (NeurIPS 2014), and the FAWN project that showed how to build low-power clusters for data-intensive computing (SOSP 2009).“
“Time and again, Dave has made me rethink my assumptions about both what the most important problems are in system design and how to go about solving them. His insights have influenced how I and other researchers think about a wide range of important topics including robustness and accountability in networks, the design of key-value stores, and power-efficient data-centers.”
“I’ve seen the best minds of my generation strung out on crypto” isn’t what you are looking for.” Maybe: “He is best known for stretching the performance and reliability envelope for distributed systems, with early and very innovative work on combating unreliable wide area communication and in using RDMA for fast RPC.”
The award was announced Tuesday, November 1st on the ACM SIGOPS web site.