John Wilkes has been at Google since 2008, where he is working on automation for building warehouse scale computers, with a current focus on capacity planning, especially for machine learning. Before this, he worked on cluster management for Google compute infrastructure (Borg, Omega, Kubernetes); and delivering physical network hardware into data centers. He is interested in many aspects of distributed systems, but a recurring theme has been technologies that allow systems to manage themselves.

He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge, joined HP Labs in 1982, and was elected an HP Fellow and an ACM Fellow in 2002 for his work on storage system design. Along the way, he’s been program committee chair for SOSP, FAST, EuroSys, and HotCloud, and has served on the steering committees for EuroSys, FAST, SoCC, and HotCloud.

He’s listed as an inventor on 50+ US patents, a co-author on three test-of-time-award papers, and has an adjunct faculty appointment at Carnegie-Mellon University. In his spare time he continues, stubbornly, trying to learn how to blow glass.