Urs Hoelzle
Urs Hölzle (German pronunciation: [ˈʊrs ˈhœltslɛ]) is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. He is the senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure.
Before joining Google, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich in 1988 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship that same year. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where his research focused on programming languages and their efficient implementation. Via a startup founded by Hölzle, David Griswold, and Lars Bak (see Strongtalk), that work then evolved into a high-performance Java VM named HotSpot, acquired by Sun's JavaSoft unit in 1997 and from there became Sun's premier JVM implementation.
He was also Brian Reid's manager at Google and mentioned in a lawsuit by Reid charging age-discrimination.
He is credited for creating Google Gulp for April Fool's Day in 2005.
He is also credited for having led the design of Google's very efficient data centers which are said to use less than half the power of a conventional data center. In 2014 he received The Economist's Innovation Award for his datacenter efficiency work. With Luiz Barroso, he wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines. In June 2007, he introduced the Climate Savers Computing Initiative together with Pat Gelsinger which aims to halve the power consumption of desktop computers and servers.
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