William (Bill) Tetzlaff           

My interests in Computer Science started before those two words were put together as a discipline. The projects I have gravitated toward  work on operating systems, memory and storage hierarchy, file systems and servers, digital media, scheduling, paging, and systems performance.

Part of my role as an IBM Emeritus Distinguished Engineer is to provide a link between my favorite universities and IBM Research. The other part is to do what ever I want, and have fun at it. My current interests are primarily in the impact of large N multi-core systems on operating systems, environments and applications.

Education

As an Academic, I am something of a late bloomer. My undergraduate engineering education was at Northwestern University in the 1960s. My PhD work happened from 1991 to 1998 at Polytechnic University, done while working full time at IBM. My adviser, and good friend is Bob Flynn. This time as a student gives me a useful perspective as both an experienced manager who hires PhDs, and as a recent PhD student who still remembers the qualifying exams vividly. I share the experience by leading panels for graduate students on "The N things I wish I had known before the PhD job search," and for undergraduates called "The N things I wish I had known before graduate school."

Some IBM honors I am proud of:

Elected President of the Academy, in 2005, after serving a term as Vice President and as a member of the Technology Council.

April 18, 1997 Promoted to Distinguished Engineer among the very first group.

In June of 1994, I received the IBM Corporate Award for contributions to the specification, design and implementation of the Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem, an improved storage management system for MVS.

Elected as a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology on July 27,1994, among with 35 new members, bringing membership to a total of almost 230.

Statistics Generating Package: Outstanding Contribution Award, 1974. SGP was an IBM product for doing data reduction of System Measurement Facility (SMF) data coming from MVS operating systems.

HPO3.4: Outstanding Technical Achievement, 1985. The project was a rewrite of the paging and real storage management algorithms of the VM operating system.

VM/Performance Reporting Facility: Outstanding Technical Achievement, 1990. VM/PRF is an IBM product that produces performance related reports from VM/Monitor data from the VM/ESA operating system.

System Managed Storage: Outstanding Innovation, 1990. SMS is a file system architecture that addresses the requirements of customers with large numbers of and users, and large volumes of data.

System Managed Storage: Outstanding Technical Achievement, 1993. Additional work on System Managed Storage.

WLFS Video Server, architecture and design: Outstanding Technical Achievement, 1993. The WLFS video server is an extension of the Workstation LAN File Services file server.

Personal background and interests

All my life I have been an active and outdoor person, hiking, skiing, playing racquetball, running daily, and running nine marathons. I continue to be very active, at least to the limits my orthopedist and back allow.

My family has made annual pilgrimages to the Southern Berkshires, where we enjoy both the outdoor activities, and also the music at Tanglewood, dance at Jacobs Pillow, theater at the Berkshire Theater Festival, Shakespeare and Company, Williams Theater Festival, and museums like Norman Rockwell, the Clark, and Mass MOCA.

My three children are all married and out of the house not, leaving me with my cat Indy a loyal friend, that I lost to kidney failure, in 2013. I lost my wife Linda, also a carrier IBMer, to bone marrow cancer, in 2007. I have six grandchildren, and counting. Visiting them is one of my joys.