Luiz André Barroso passed away at the age of 59. As the founder of the modern cloud computing industry, he has made an indelible contribution to the development of Google.
Luiz André Barroso, the inventor of the data center, the founder of cloud computing, and a 22-year veteran of Google, died unexpectedly on September 16 at the age of 59.
Google CEO Pichai and DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean both tweeted their condolences, saying that Luiz's death was a huge loss to Google and the entire technology industry.
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the development of large-scale computing centers, he won the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2020.
He is recognized as a premier architect of new hyperscale data center designs. It can be said that without him, there would be no current cloud computing industry, and the mobile Internet industry would be very different.
The reason why Google is able to provide such a wide range of search engine services around the world also relies on his leadership and contribution.
He is a Google Fellow (the highest level of Google technical staff) and the head of the Cross-Google Engineering (xGE) office, responsible for company-wide technical coordination.
In addition to his outstanding achievements in industry, he is also an academician of the National Academy of Engineering, an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the authors of the textbook "The Datacenter as a Computer", and has published many high-quality papers.
In addition, he is a naturalist who loves observing and photographing wildlife. He is a board member of the Rainforest Trust, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting important wildlife habitats around the world.
A dazzling professional resume
Barroso has dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer since he was a child.
He spent his childhood in Brazil, a radio amateur like his grandfather, and later earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
He later came to the United States to pursue a PhD in computer architecture at the University of Southern California.
After graduation, he worked in chips at Compaq and Digital Equipment. But he joined Google in 2001, hoping to focus on software engineering.
When he first arrived at Google, Barroso spent most of his time playing more than just a programmer - employees of the small startup at that time had to solve all the technical problems encountered in the company's development.
Three years after joining Google, Urs Hölzle, the company's chief vice president of engineering, put Barroso in charge of rebuilding the company's infrastructure.
"I was the only person at Google who knew anything about hardware," Barroso recalled in a 2012 interview with Wired.
"Reinventing" the data center
When he took over Google's infrastructure work, Internet businesses typically hosted their websites on servers in data centers maintained by another company.
But these providers couldn't keep up with Google's ever-expanding search needs.
Although Barroso did not have much experience in building data centers at that time, he saw the shortcomings and limitations of the entire data center system and ecosystem at that time.
So he decided to overthrow the existing system and reinvent the "data center" based on Google's needs.
Under his leadership, Google developed its first data center, which consisted of 40-foot-tall shipping containers filled with servers.
Such a design can meet higher cooling requirements and simplify engineering issues in construction.
By 2006, Google opened its first data center campus of its own in Oregon, which looked similar to the traditional, regular, boxy, massive buildings that now populate the world.
But Barroso's design ideas make the interior of an ordinary data center extraordinary.
He and his colleagues at Google abandoned the then-standard approach of centralizing critical software in expensive, powerful computers customized specifically for data centers.
Instead, they began distributing Google's programs across thousands of cheaper, mid-range servers. The advantage of this is that it not only saves the cost of purchasing expensive professional data center hardware, but also saves energy and allows the software to run more flexibly.
Barroso elaborated on his new ideas in the book "The Datacenter as a Compute" co-authored with Hölzle, which became an important document on modern computing infrastructure.
"We must think of the data center itself as a giant warehouse-scale computer," the book reads. This book is the first textbook to introduce the architecture of large-scale data center computing systems in detail, and it is now in its third edition.
Barroso's ideas quickly spread throughout Silicon Valley. Meta and other Internet giants have adopted a similar approach to building data centers as Google. The architecture Barroso designed became the foundation of Google's cloud computing division, which now accounts for about 10% of the company's total revenue.
Google, under the leadership of Luiz André Barroso, pioneered the reinvention of the large data center, overturning many traditions in the computing industry and laying the foundation for the development of cloud computing in Silicon Valley.
A fruitful technical leader
After this, Barroso went on to lead many major projects at Google:
Barroso led the team that created Google's AI chip, the TPU.
Led Google's "geo" services, including integrating augmented reality and machine learning into map services; and founded Google's core department, xGE: responsible for the development and management of software and other tools used across the company.
In 2020, he received the Eckert Mauchly Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions to computer architecture.
Jen Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of Google's infrastructure organization, said Barroso left an indelible mark at Google and his contributions to the company and the industry were countless.
"We have lost a beloved friend, colleague and respected leader," she wrote in a statement on behalf of the company.