The department boasts a strong research team with extensive expertise in systems research and a good blend of experience and youth. The research team currently contains eight regular members and two contractors. Members may be contacted using IBM employee directory.
Current Members
Donna Dillenberger
Department Manager. Donna joined IBM in 1988 and has worked on future hardware simulations, mainframe operating systems, workload management, scalable JVMs, scalable web servers, stream Servers and J2EE containers. She is a Distinguished Engineer, IBM's Chief Architect of IT Optimization solutions, a Master Inventor, a member of the IBM Academy and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. She is currently working on Enterprise Workload Management and mainframe hypervisors.
Pavitra Ghanta
Contract Software Engineer. Pavitra is currently working on integrating Enterprise Workload Management capabilities into Websphere XD.
Steve Heisig
Steve Heisig works on zOS research projects in the Utility Operating Environments department at research. Currently he is working on configuration comparison and analysis, zOS suspend and spin lock instrumentation, hardware/software performance interactions for z6, Abend scoring, and tooling to supply OS developers with hints about possible hardware performance hazards their code may be liable to see. Steve is the research representative to the Software Design Council and the z Business Leaders Council. He started with IBM in MVS System Test where he looked at dumps, then worked in the Architecture department, the original POSIX development team, and then the WLM development and test team. He spent much of 1996 at ABSA in South Africa looking at problems during their implementation of IMS data sharing. On return to the US he joined the MVS research department. In 2003 he spent most of the year as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford working on the eDiamond Digital Mammography project. Exposure to machine learning experts at Oxford kindled his interest in using these techniques for OS performance and systems management problems. He has since been working on prototypes and approaches to characterize OS resource consumption using powerful technologies from other domains that could be applied to the systems management and performance area.
Mark Hulber
Mark Hulber joined the department in 1999 after spending 3 years as an IBM Cooperative Fellow. Mark has a B.A. in Communication Arts and Sciences from Michigan State University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition, Mark spent time as a M.S. candidate in Computer Science at California State University, Sacramento and a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Today, Mark spends time doing Computer Systems research by contributing to Enterprise Workload Manager and related technologies.
Josh Knight
Research Staff Member. Josh Knight received a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1978. He joined IBM in 1981 and has since worked on hardware and software performance, and server software technologies.
Ray Mansell
Software Engineer. Ray Mansell received a first-class honours degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bath (UK) in 1972. He worked for both Phillips and Westinghouse in the UK before joining the IBM Hursley Laboratory in 1974, where he began working on mainframe-based engineering design systems. His interests quickly broadened to mainframe programming in general, and VM/370 in particular, where he made many improvements to both the usability and performance of systems. Following an international assignment to the US to work with the VM development organisation, he returned to the UK before eventually transferring to IBM Research in 1990. Since then, he has continued his mainframe work, largely in the area of file systems performance, along with forays into the PC world where he was part of a small team that produced a comprehensive performance-analysis and load-balancing system for the Lotus Domino server. He also implemented a version of the Macintosh file system for the mainframe which, together with changes to the Novell Netware server, allowed Macintosh systems to use mainframe-based disks. He continues to work with z/VM, most recently in the area of investigating and implementing techniques that can improve the efficiency with which Linux runs as a guest operating system.
Dhruba Mazumder
Software Engineer. Dhruba joined this department in 2006, he came from IBM India. Dhruba working in IBM since 1999, he has a bacherlor's degree in Mechanical Engineering. Initally he worked on WebSphere. Currently he is working on Enterprise Workload Manager and related technologies.
Matthew Stitt
Contract Software Engineer. Matt has an Associates Degree from a two year college in Illinois. He has been in Data Processing for over 25 years, with 15 years in Z/VSE and 20 years a Systems programmer on Z/OS. Matt also spent 5 years working with Z/VM and has worked with applications such as CICS, IMS, and DB2.
Gong Su
Research Staff Member. Mr. Gong Su holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Columbia University. He has a broad interest in system architect and design with an emphasis on operating system and networking. He is currently working on improving existing and introducing new functionality to z/OS, IBM's proprietary operating system for the Z series eServer. Before joining IBM, he worked as the Chief Software Engineer of NeXtorage, Inc., a privately held storage solutions startup company.
Matt Thoennes
Senior Engineer. Matt Thoennes received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1982. He joined the IBM Data Systems Division in Poughkeepsie, NY in that same year. His work was in the area of high speed multiplier logic. He joined IBM Research in 1984 as part of the IBM Research Parallel Processor (RP3) project. There he worked in the area of CAE design systems and design, build and test of the RP3 hardware. After the successful completion of RP3, he continued to work in the area of high performance I/O for parallel machines. In 1996 and 1997, he was responsible for the technical infrastructure for the two IBM Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov chess matches. In 2002, he received a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Since then he has been involved in the area of enterprise workload management, focusing on the area of resource management for distributed computing environments.
Alumni
Alan Bivens
Research Staff Member. Alan joined IBM in 2002 where he has worked on creating autonomic workload management capabilities to allow datacenters to be self-healing and self-optimizing. Before IBM, Alan completed Masters and PhD degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he created artificial intelligence-based network management techniques. His current work deals with load balancing, power management, and coordination between autonomic managers.
Alan Webb
Software Engineer. Alan Webb joined IBM in 1977 as a founding member of the Warwick Computing Centre in England in computer operations. After several years in operations and systems programming he took a 5 year assignment in Raleigh, N.C. to work on the networking side of the IBM common repository. Following that he returned to IBM Hursley where he joined the Finance Industry project in 1990. The most well known progeny of this project was MQ. He was the technical lead for IBM's first collaborative project with Hewlett Packard that delivered distributed CICS on the HP platform. Alan implemented IBM's first fully functional Java virtual machine on AIX in August of 1995. For the next four years he was a technical lead and chief architect for the Java Technology Center in Hursley. During that time he was the technical lead for the JVM on z/OS and an internal implementation on Linux. As Java became mainstream Alan moved to research in Watson where he has worked on a number of disparate projects, all related in some way or another, to the z/Series platform. While in the Enterprise Systems Group Alan worked on IO related projects - z/OS and z/VM SCSI, PCI Express IO Virtualization and management, and the integration of policy based security with RACF. In 1998, while working at the JTC, Alan received a Master's degree (with Distinction) in software engineering from Oxford University in England.
Yuan Chen (Johns Hopkins University)
2007 Summer Intern. Yuan’s work at IBM dealt with 3D visual representation of IBM’s zSeries eServer mainframe. Yuan is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, where she works under Dr. Jonathan D. Cohen for the Computer Graphics Lab. Her research interests include scientific visualization, 3D model reconstruction and Graphics hardware.
Andrew Dias (Univeristy of Wisconsin at Madison)
2007 Summer Intern. Andrew's work at IBM focused on developing a virtual representation of a data center. He is working on a degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
George Todd Gamblin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
2006 Summer Intern. Todd's work at IBM dealt with global clock synchronization algorithms for distributed systems running EWLM. Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he works under Dr. Daniel A. Reed for the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). His research interests include performance monitoring and adaptively optimizing runtime systems.
Rui Zhang (Oxford University)
2005 - 2006 Technical Co-op.Rui's work at IBM focused on developing
a rule-based expert system, zDolphin, to identify hazardous instruction sequences in assembler code that can cause pipeline disruptions in System z processors. Rui is pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Oxford University. His thesis work is on performance problem
localization in transaction-oriented distributed systems.
Houda Lamehamedi (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
2004 Summer Intern. Houda's work at IBM focused on addressing virtualization issues in systems management applications.
Karthik Pattabiraman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2004 Summer Intern. Karthik's work at IBM focused on algorithms for migrating the memory of operating systems executing on virtual machines from one physical machine to another.
Roshawnna Scales (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
2003 Summer Intern. Roshawnna's work at IBM focused on JAVA technologies for enterprise environments.
Manpreet Singh (Cornell University)
2003 Summer Intern. Manpreet's work at IBM focused on networking aspects of systems management.