Dan has been a technical and executive leader in the computer and networking industries for over 35 years. Currently, he leads the NetInfra team at Google, which is responsible for all cluster and host networking software for Google’s data centers. Over his career, he co-founded and led engineering teams at three successful start-ups and worked at major companies such as Cisco, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Apple. Before rejoining Google (he had a short stint as the VP of Platforms back in 2005), he was most recently at Intel which had acquired Barefoot Networks where Dan was a co-founder. Barefoot produced a line of high-performance programmable switch chips and software that use the P4 language. Barefoot was collaborating with Google on P4, P4-Runtime and most recently PINS.
Dan’s interest and experience are in leading-edge software and hardware designs that push the state-of-the-art in distributed systems, networking and fault-tolerance. Some of the major projects Dan has led include:
Cisco’s UCS blade server line that featured network-controlled virtual server identity and configuration through the Virtualized Interface Card smart NIC and associated software.
Cisco’s CRS-1 multi-chassis core router and distributed IOS-XR network operating system.
Silicon Graphics’ Origin Supercomputer that supported up to 1000 processors sharing cache-coherent shared memory
Stanford’s DASH cc-numa computer which was the basis of his PhD dissertation under John Hennessey
Outside of work, Dan likes to spend time with his wife and his three 20-something kids, running (26 marathons and counting), biking, hiking, scuba diving, traveling and nerding out on high-tech gadgets.
