Willy Zwaenepoel

Professor Willy Zwaenepoel is a distinguished academic and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney. He holds Fellowships from ACM, IEEE, and ATSE. His research focuses on distributed systems, operating systems, and experimental computer science. Previously, he spent two decades at Rice University and nine years as Dean of EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences before joining Sydney in 2018.

Education:

• BS/MS, Ghent University (1979)
• MS/PhD, Stanford University (1980/1984)

Research Interests: His work emphasizes distributed systems and operating systems, with contributions to key-value stores, transactional systems, and large-scale graph processing. Recent projects include optimizing geo-replicated systems and improving datacenter scheduling efficiency.

Articles Trends: Recent publications address OS scheduling (Nest), distributed graph mining (Tesseract), and transactional systems' performance limits. He explores hardware-software co-design for multicore systems and energy-efficient data centers.

Awards:

• Fellow of ACM (2021)
• Fellow of IEEE (2020)
• Fellow of ATSE (2019)

Grants & Advising: Active grants include adaptive key-value store research (2021) and large-graph processing systems (2018). He advises PhD students and postdocs on distributed systems and storage challenges.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Sydney systems research group focusing on scalable distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.