Luiz André Barroso has been announced to be the recipient of the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society for pioneering the design of warehouse-scale computing and driving it from concept to industry.

Barroso is a vice president of engineering at Google, leading the Core team to create a strong technical foundation for Google’s flagship products. His scientific breakthroughs are the reason why we are able to use a lot of applications such as cloud computing, powerful search engines and faster internet services.

Barroso will be honoured with the award and a prize of $5,000 at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture aka ISCA which will take place virtually in June 2020.

Barroso receives this award for his architectural vision for a holistic system that brought together individual compute, storage and network abilities. This breakthrough has been responsible for comprehensive designs across large-scale distribution systems.

Barroso was the lead architect of the design of Google’s first data centres at an industrial scale - capable of functioning with millions of disk-drives and thousands of servers. His designs teamed affordable hardware with robust distributed systems software to transform system design. In fact, these gigantic data centres garnered a new term - hyper-scale data centres. Industry forecast predicts that by 2022, the hyperspace datacenter’s market will be worth $ 80 billion annually.

However, his contributions go beyond just hyper-scale data centres. Virtually all the hardware architectures that power today’s internet services and cloud computing systems feature elements introduced by Barroso and his team at Google.

In the past two decades, he also led the technical team responsible for Google’s computing infrastructure. Barroso also is one of the chief architects of Google Maps, leading the engineering team, as a Google Fellow. His influence reaches far beyond the technical field. As a thought leader, he has made significant contributions in the academic field of data centre and system design. Barroso also was the joint author of the first textbook on the architecture of massive warehouse-scale computers, “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines.” The concepts in this book are behind powering all of the internet services today.

The Eckert-Mauchly Award was first co-sponsored by the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1979 to honour contributions in the field of computer and digital systems architecture. It was instated in the honour of John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who together worked on the design and construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the pioneering large-scale electronic computing machine.