Elmootazbellah Elnozahy

Biography

Elmootazbellah (Mootaz) Elnozahy is currently a Professor of Computer Science in the Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division at KAUST. He joined KAUST in 2013, initially serving as the Dean of the CEMSE Division for eight years and then as a Special Advisor to the KAUST President for one year.

Before joining KAUST, Professor Elnozahy worked for 15 years at IBM Research in Austin, TX, and as an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, U.S. Dr. Elnozahy earned his M.S. and Ph.D.in Computer Science from Rice University, Houston, Texas. He earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt. His IBM mentors nominated Elnozahy for leadership and management training at Harvard Business School and McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.

With a 40-year career of inventions and innovations, he holds 58 patents in energy-efficient computer systems and high-performance computing and resilience, among others. His most significant patents are “Web server architecture for improved performance/US 7,499,966)” and “Processing of requests for static objects in a network server/US 6,879,999),” which describe the technology for caching dynamic content in the U.S. Census 2000 website, reducing information query time from six minutes to two seconds, which was critical for acceptable performance.

Also, “Verification of service level agreement contracts/US 6,792,459” was licensed by Xerox PARC, enabling third-party verification of performance agreements. Other significant patents on energy consumption were incorporated in IBM POWER 6 and POWER 7 systems (e.g., U.S. 6,985,952, 8,250,298).

Elnozahy wrote a defining article on the theory and practice of rollback-recovery, built the world’s first computer server out of low-power processors and led the PERCS project (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded research phase of the IBM POWER 7-IH).

He received the Ralph Budd Award from Rice University, U.S.; Research Initiation Awards (RIA) and Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF); the Trailblazer Award from the University of Texas; the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award and an IBM President Award from IBM; and was named Master Inventor for Life by IBM in 2006. Aside from his technical and leadership achievements, Professor Mootaz has been a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), is an Honorary Professor at Amity University Noida, India, and an adviser to the University of Coimbra, Portugal and Texas A & M University.

Elnozahy was Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Elnozahy is a Fellow of the IEEE and an elected chair of IFIP Working Group 10.4. He served as a Guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers, Special Issue on Energy Efficient Computing, the IBM Journal of Research and Development (Special Issue on Low-Power Systems) and the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems Newsletter.

He has held visiting research scientist positions at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), U.S. and Bell Laboratories Research (Lucent Technologies), U.S. During his career, he served on over 60 technical program committees for leading conferences in computing systems. Nearly 100 colloquium invitations have been extended to him around the world. He has also received multiple Best Paper awards.