Operating Systems
One of the architects of BSD Unix which was a major factor in the rapid growth of the Internet
Ozalp Babaoglu
Professore Alma Mater, University of Bologna
Professore Alma Mater, University of Bologna
Ozalp Babaoglu is "Professore Alma Mater" at the University of Bologna where he was Professor of Computer Science from 1988 to 2025. In 2024 he co-founded the ELICSIR Foundation where he is currently President.
Babaoglu received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. His virtual memory extensions to AT&T Unix as a graduate student at UC Berkeley became the basis for a long line of BSD Unix distributions. He is the recipient of 1982 David J. Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Unix system community and to Open Industry Standards.
Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoglu was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he worked on distributed systems and fault-tolerance. Since moving to Italy, he has been active in numerous European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems.
In 2001 he co-founded the Bertinoro international center for informatics (BiCi). Since its inception, this "Italian Dagstuhl" has organized more than 300 prestigious scientific meetings/schools and has had thousands of young researchers from all over the world pass through its doors. In 2002 Babaoglu was made a Fellow of the ACM for his "contributions to fault-tolerant distributed computing, BSD Unix, and for leadership in the European distributed systems community". From 2002 to 2005 he was the coordinator of the European Union Framework Five BISON Project that resulted in seminal work on biology-inspired techniques applied to dynamic networks and on gossip-based distributed algorithms. In 2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) conference series and has been a member of its Steering Committee from 2007 to 2019 and has served as co-general chair for the 2007 and 2013 editions. From 2013 to 2019, he was on the Selection Committee for the ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which brings together young researchers in Computer Science and Mathematics with Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates. He served for two decades on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.
One of the architects of BSD Unix which was a major factor in the rapid growth of the Internet
Implementation and evaluation of the virtual memory subsystem in BSD Unix.
Work on global state detection and atomic commitment problems.
Study of communication network topologies' role in this fundamental problem with contributions to lower-bound results and algorithms.
Development of the Paralex system transforming local-area network workstations into a "supercomputer," establishing the NOW research field.
Work on group communication in partitionable systems introduced the "overlay network" concept as fundamental abstraction for distributed systems.
Early advocacy for "grassroots" and "data-driven" approaches achieving self-* properties in data centers through emergence and machine learning rather than explicit programming.
Development of gossip-based algorithms for aggregation, topology management, shape formation, and loose synchronization in large distributed systems.
Development of "design patterns" library for distributed computing inspired by biological or natural processes as part of the EU BISON Project.
Early application of evolutionary game theory ideas to problems of cooperation and selfishness in peer-to-peer computing.
Proposed architectures for peer-to-peer cloud computing and algorithms for server consolidation leveraging P2P systems to reduce costs and energy consumption.
Application of machine learning techniques to building predictive models for failures, fault classification, job dispatching, and power consumption in data centers and HPC systems.
