Lew Tucker

Last updated
Lew Tucker
Lew Tucker (2315010875).jpg
Born (1950-04-24) April 24, 1950 (age 73)
Education Cornell University (BS, 1972)
Polytechnic Institute of New York
(MS and Ph.D., 1984)
Known for Open Source, Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Computing
Title
Parent

Lewis Wiley Tucker (born April 24, 1950) is an American computer scientist, open source advocate, and industry executive spanning several decades of technology innovation. [1] As an early proponent of internet technologies, he held executive-level positions at Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, and Cisco Systems contributing to the advancement of the Java programming language and platform, the AppExchange on-demand application marketplace, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform.

Contents

Early life and education

The son of big band Leader Tommy Tucker,[ citation needed ] he grew up in the West Allenhurst section of Ocean Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey and attended the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey for high school. [2] He graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Biology.

Career

Having interests in neurobiology and computer science, in 1976 Tucker started as a laboratory technician at the Laboratory of Neurobiology at Cornell University Medical College. He later become an assistant research scientist bringing computing to medical imaging and contributing to several research papers on neurogenic control of hypertension. [3] [4] He completed a Masters and Ph.D. in computer science from Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1984. His dissertation spanned both computer vision and parallel machine architectures for biomedical image analysis. [5]

Upon completing his Ph.D., Tucker joined a new startup, Thinking Machines, in Cambridge, MA. Thinking Machines was founded by Daniel Hillis to develop technology for artificial intelligence using parallel computing. As research director for computer vision, Tucker contributed to the software [6] and architecture of the Connection Machine, an early commercial massively parallel machine containing over 65,000 processors that was used by national laboratories working on supercomputing grand challenges.

In 1994 Thinking Machines was acquired by Sun Microsystems. Tucker joined Sun to lead an engineering team brought in from Thinking Machines in Chelmsford, MA. A year later, he moved to California as part of an initial team of developers and executives behind Java, a new programming language and platform designed for the emerging web. Tucker became Director of ISV Relations, evangelizing the use of Java technology by large corporations and startups alike. [7] He was a frequent speaker on how the growing internet would become a force in the industry and was featured alongside other internet pioneers in "Digerati: encounters with the cyber elite". [8] In 2000, at Sun Microsystems, Tucker became VP of Internet Services responsible for www.sun.com and java.sun.com.

In 2004, Tucker left Sun to join Salesforce.com where he created the AppExchange, one of the first online marketplaces for software-as-a-service applications. He left Salesforce.com to join Radar Networks, [9] to advance a new semantic web platform, Twine.com, based on RDF.

With the emergence of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, Tucker returned to Sun Microsystems in 2008 as Vice President and CTO to develop Sun’s platform for cloud computing. [10] [11] Just prior to launching Sun Cloud, the company was acquired by Oracle in 2010 shutting down the effort.

Tucker left to join Cisco Systems, Inc., as the company’s first VP and Chief Technology Officer for cloud computing. [12] [13] As Cloud CTO, [14] Tucker moved Cisco into becoming a major contributor to the open source developer community being built around OpenStack. [15] He served as vice-chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, [16] [17] and board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, [18] and Cloud Foundry Foundation. [19]

Select articles and presentations

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Java (programming language)</span> Object-oriented programming language

Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Corporation</span> American multinational computer corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, United States. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, and supply chain management (SCM) software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is an environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.

The Network Computer was a diskless desktop computer device made by Oracle Corporation from about 1996 to 2000. The devices were designed and manufactured by an alliance, which included Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others. The devices were designed with minimum specifications, based on the Network Computer Reference Profile. The brand was also employed as a marketing term to try to popularize this design of computer within enterprise and among consumers.

Fortress is a discontinued experimental programming language for high-performance computing, created by Sun Microsystems with funding from DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems project. One of the language designers was Guy L. Steele Jr., whose previous work includes Scheme, Common Lisp, and Java.

A tuple space is an implementation of the associative memory paradigm for parallel/distributed computing. It provides a repository of tuples that can be accessed concurrently. As an illustrative example, consider that there are a group of processors that produce pieces of data and a group of processors that use the data. Producers post their data as tuples in the space, and the consumers then retrieve data from the space that match a certain pattern. This is also known as the blackboard metaphor. Tuple space may be thought as a form of distributed shared memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Yeager</span> American engineer

William "Bill" Yeager is an American engineer. He is best known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night", multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory as well as the Stanford University Computer Science department.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danese Cooper</span> American advocate of open source software

Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of open source software.

java.net was a Java technology related community website. It also offered a web-based source code repository for Java projects. It was shut down in April 2017.

Sun Cloud was an on-demand Cloud computing service operated by Sun Microsystems prior to its acquisition by Oracle Corporation. The Sun Cloud Compute Utility provided access to a substantial computing resource over the Internet for US$1 per CPU-hour. It was launched as Sun Grid in March 2006. It was based on and supported open source technologies such as Solaris 10, Sun Grid Engine, and the Java platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Java (software platform)</span> Set of computer software and specifications

Java is a set of computer software and specifications that provides a software platform for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform computing environment. Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms from embedded devices and mobile phones to enterprise servers and supercomputers. Java applets, which are less common than standalone Java applications, were commonly run in secure, sandboxed environments to provide many features of native applications through being embedded in HTML pages.

Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Azul Systems</span> Computer manufacturer of appliances for executing Java-based applications

Azul Systems, Inc. develops runtimes for executing Java-based applications. Founded in March 2002, Azul Systems has headquarter in Sunnyvale, California.

zembly

Zembly was a browser-based development environment from Sun Microsystems that enabled social programming of applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone web applications, and other social platforms, as well as web widgets. Users of zembly interacted with one another via zembly's social networking features to engage in co-development of applications for these platforms. It was available from 2008 to 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppScale</span> American cloud infrastructure software company

AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, however, its source code remains freely available to the open-source community.

Terracotta, Inc. is a computer software company that is specialized in increasing scalability and performance of real-time Big Data applications. The company's flagship product is Terracotta DB, an in-memory distributed data management platform which provides persistent storage, caching and compute capabilities. Their products are used in 190 countries by over two million developers and more than 2.5 million deployments. The company is owned by Software AG.

CloudBees is an enterprise software delivery company. Sacha Labourey and Francois Dechery co-founded the company in early 2010, and investors include Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, HSBC, Verizon Ventures, Golub Capital, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bridgepoint Group.

Christopher (Chris) Ferris is a computer scientist, best known for co-leading the Hyperledger Fabric project where he chaired the Technical Steering Committee from 2016 to 2018 and was a member of the Governing Board of the foremost blockchain project of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger has been one of the fastest-growing open community projects, with over 200 corporate and associate members. Ferris has a history of open-source software contributions to other technologies, including web services and cloud. Ferris is currently an IBM Fellow, and CTO Open Technologies.

References

  1. Smith, Roger (22 January 2009). "Sun Cloud CTO: 'Your Data Center Is Your Computer'". Information Week. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  2. "Local Happenings; Asbury Park Area", Asbury Park Press , February 13, 1968. Accessed January 1, 2023, via Newspapers.com. "Jonathan Vegosen, Deal Park, and Lewis Tucker, West Allenhurst, both Ocean Township, received gold keys for their membership in the honor service organization, the Gold Key, at Peddie School, Hightstown, at Founders Day exercises Sunday."
  3. Nathan, Marc A.; Tucker, Lewis W.; Severini, W.H.; Reis, Donald J. (1978). "Enhancement of conditioned arterial pressure responses in cats after brainstem lesions". Science. 201 (4350): 71–73. Bibcode:1978Sci...201...71N. doi:10.1126/science.663640. PMID   663640.
  4. Nakai, Masatsugu; Iadecola, Constantino; Ruggiero, David A.; Tucker, Lewis W.; Reis, Donald J. (1983). "Electrical stimulation of cerebellar fastigial nucleus increases cerebral cortical blood flow without change in local metabolism: evidence for an intrinsic system in brain for primary vasodilation". Brain Research. 260 (1): 35–49. doi:10.1016/0006-8993(83)90762-X. PMID   6824954. S2CID   24933126.
  5. Tucker, Lewis Wiley (1984). Computer vision using quad tree refinement. Ph.D. Dissertation. Polytechnic University. p. 169. ISBN   9781392464519.
  6. Tucker, L.W.; Mainwaring, A. (March 31, 1994). "CMMD: Active messages on the CM-5". Parallel Computing. 20 (4): 481–496. doi:10.1016/0167-8191(94)90024-8.
  7. "Java Developer Connection". Archived from [http:/developer.java.sun.com/developer/index.html the original] on 1999-10-13.{{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  8. Brockman, John (1996). Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. Hardwired. pp. 295–300. ISBN   1888869046.
  9. Spivack, Nova. "Lew Tucker — Java Pioneer and Creator of Salesforce.com's AppExchange to be CTO of Radar Networks" . Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  10. Krill, Paul. "Sun challenges Amazon for cloud computing". Infoworld. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
  11. Creeger, Mache (August 2009). "CTO Roundtable: Cloud Computing". Communications of the ACM. 52 (8): 50–56. doi: 10.1145/1536616.1536633 . S2CID   26273969.
  12. Malik, Om. "Former Sun Techie Is Now Cisco's Cloud CTO". GigaOM. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  13. Lawson, Stephen. "Sun's Lew Tucker to Lead Cisco's Cloud Efforts". CIO. IDG Communications, Inc. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  14. Bort, Julie. "The 39 Most Important People in Cloud Computing". Business Insider. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  15. Suri, Isha (17 October 2012). "Cisco Announces Free OpenStack Distribution". Siliconangle.com.
  16. DEUTSCHER, Maria (30 August 2012). "The 7 Hour OpenStack Foundation Meeting: New Leadership Team and Not Much Else". SiliconAngle. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  17. Cathey, Robert (January 16, 2015). "OpenStack Community Elects 2015 Foundation Board Members". Business Wire.
  18. "CNCF Governing Board". Archived from the original on 2018-09-08. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
  19. "Cloud Foundry Board". Archived from the original on 2018-10-20. Retrieved 31 December 2020.