Sam Whitlock

About

I’m a research engineer in the Cloud Efficiency team in the Systems Research group, where I focus on overclocking, power scheduling, and resource provisioning in the data center as part of the Zissou project.

My academic endeavor prior to joining Microsoft Research was the completion of my PhD at EPFL, where I worked on myriad things, beginning with NFV offloading from servers into the top-of-rack switch and culminating in my dissertation work on the acceleration of bioinformatics workloads in the data center. Prior to graduate school, I spent time working on research in software-defined networking (specifically troubleshooting these systems) as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Between semesters or years in my academic journey, I have spent time working on data center software at Twitter, VMware, ICSI, and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

The theme of my work throughout my career has been the creation of cloud middleware that separates the operational complexity of the data center from the customer and developer experiences of using the data center. My current work at Microsoft focuses on improving data center efficiency to not only lower the cost of data center operations, but to reduce the impact of data centers on this one planet we all share.