Brazilian engineer Luiz André Barroso, who led many of Google’s technical achievements, including the data center, computing infrastructural designs, others has died.
Luiz Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for the world’s development of cloud computing.
Barroso, a 22-year veteran of Google who unexpectedly died on September 16 at age 59, built his data centers with low-cost components instead of expensive specialized hardware. He reimagined how they worked together to develop the concept of “the data center as a computer,” which now underpins the web, mobile apps, and other internet services.
Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google’s infrastructure organization, says Barroso left an indelible imprint at the company whose contributions to the industry are countless. “We lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader,” she writes in a statement on behalf of the company.
Barroso joined Google in 2001, before that, he began his career in 1995 with Digital Equipment Corporation, where he worked for six years as a Principal member of the Research staff. He received his BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rio de Janeiro’s Pontificia Universidade Catolica and his Ph.D in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, US. According to Google Bio, Barroso has co-authored “The Datacenter as a Computer,” the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems.
