Garth Gibson Assumes Chief Scientist Role at Panasas to Address Big Data Market
Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, has announced that it has bolstered its executive team to include a new technology-focused, chief scientist position. Panasas co-founder, Dr. Garth Gibson, has been promoted to that new role, with 11-year Panasas veteran, Dr. Brent Welch, replacing him as chief technology officer (CTO).
“Garth Gibson’s pioneering efforts in parallel storage architectures, including his tireless work on bringing the Parallel NFS (pNFS) standard to light, have established Panasas as a respected leader in the high performance storage space,” said Faye Pairman, chief executive officer of Panasas. “With Dr. Gibson and Dr. Welch in their respective new roles, Panasas is well-positioned to identify trends and capitalize on new technologies for sustained and long-term product development.”
Gibson received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley he co-wrote the seminal “Berkeley RAID Paper.” He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 where he founded the Parallel Data Laboratory, one of the country’s premier academic storage system research labs. Gibson’s work with parallel storage architectures led to the creation of the pNFS standard that serves as the foundation for high performance Panasas storage solutions. His contributions to the industry have been recognized by numerous trade associations and publications; his RAID paper was inducted into the SIGOPS Hall of Fame in 2011. In his new role as chief scientist, Gibson will serve as principal technology advisor to Panasas, identifying and evaluating future trends to aid the company in setting its long-term priorities and strategies.
Welch received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he designed and built his first distributed file system called Sprite. He has an extensive background in high performance computing (HPC) storage, with deep experience building software systems from the device driver level up through network servers, and user applications. Welch actively participates in the NFSv4 working group, and co-authored the pNFS internet drafts that specify parallel I/O extensions for NFSv4. He is considered an industry expert in HPC and has authored many journal and conference papers on the subject. In addition, he wrote the definitive programming guide for the Tcl scripting language. Welch formerly served as the company’s chief architect, and will continue performing that role as CTO.
