Dr. John Carter           

Dr. John Carter is a Distinguished Engineer, Master Inventor, and member of the IBM Cloud Infrastructure CTO team.  In this role, he is leading IBM's introduction of key enterprise cloud capabilities, including more security-, data-, and analytics-driven operations (AI Ops); integrating enterprise-class servers into IBM Cloud (e.g., Power AIX/IBM-i and mainframe servers), and developing next-generation software-defined network, storage, and compute solutions.  Prior to joining the CTO team, Dr. Carter was the Lead Architect of Hyperscale Cloud in IBM's Cloud Innovation Lab, where he led IBM's effort to design, deploy, automate, and operate hyperscale cloud data centers.  He is an IBM Master Inventor in recognition of his contributions to and leadership of IBM's innovation and IP strategy.

Prior to joining the CloudLab, Dr. Carter led the Future Systems department at IBM Research - Austin, which performed research on data center networking, power-aware systems, and mobile enterprise systems.  The Data Center Networking research group developed software-defined data center network technologies by exploiting and extending OpenFlow and IBM switch firmware to support scalable, reliable, secure, virtualized, converged flat Layer 2 (Ethernet) data center networks.   This work led to three SIGCOMM papers that explored innovative massive-scale network monitoring (Planck), edge-based load balancing (Presto), and virtual congestion control (AC/DC TCP).  The Mobile Enterprise Systems research group developed novel technologies and services for IBM's next generation Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) offerings, e.g., novel mobile runtime environments, mobile services (e.g., analytics, message queuing, performance monitoring, a variety of storage systems, security, and privacy), and specialized services or specific verticals (system management, search, smart medicine, smart energy, and smart commerce).  Power Aware Systems research group developed an array of technologies that dramatically reduced data center and server energy consumption as part of IBM's Smart Planet initiative. These projects included: (i) co-managing both computing resources and the electrical/cooling infrastructure, (ii) devising energy-aware virtualization mechanisms that made consolidation and task placement decisions based partly on energy efficiency, (iii) developing low-power high-performance storage servers, and i(v) developing platform energy management solutions that actively managed the power consumed by individual components within a server (e.g., processors, memory, fans, and power supplies).

Prior to joining IBM, Dr. Carter was the Associate Director of the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he led a number of research projects in the areas of multiprocessor computer architecture, distributed systems, and memory system design. Additional details on these projects (e.g., Impulse, Ultraviolet, Khazana, and more) can be found on Dr. Carter's (legacy) webpage at the University of Utah.

Dr. Carter is a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM and has been on the conference organizing and program committees of many technical conferences, including serving as Program Chair of the 22nd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2017), General Chair of the 2011 and 2012 IEEE International Symposia on Workload Characterization (IISWC '11/'12), and General Chair of the 2008 Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA '08).  Dr. Carter has dozens of journal and conference papers on a wide variety of topics and holds over forty patents.

Dr. Carter received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1993 from Rice University, working under the guidance of Willy Zwaenepoel in the area of efficient distributed shared memory (cf., Munin).