Darrell Long


Darrell Don Earl Long is an American computer scientist and computer engineer, Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Letters of the Computer Society, Editor-in-Chief, emeritus, of the ACM Transactions on Storage .
In 2002, he was the founder of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies, one of the most prestigious venues in the computer data storage field.

Biography

Long attended public schools in El Cajon, California.
He did his undergraduate studies at San Diego State University, graduating in 1984, and went on to graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, earning a Ph.D. in 1988 under the supervision of Jehan-François Pâris.
While in graduate school, he served as a lecturer in mathematics at San Diego State University and in computer science at the University of California, San Diego. After earning his Ph.D. he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
At UCSC, he has served as associate dean for research and graduate studies in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, and he is Director emeritus of the Storage Systems Research Center.
In the field of Computer Science, where women are significantly underrepresented, he has been recognized for his success in producing female doctoral graduates in Computer Science.
He has held visiting faculty positions at the Université Paris–Dauphine, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, the Université Paris–Descartes, Sorbonne Université, the University of Technology, Sydney, the Center for Communications Research, the United States Naval Postgraduate School and is Professor ad Honorem de la Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
He is an Associate Member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
He served as the Vice-Chair and then Chair of the University of California Committee on Research Policy. He has served on the University of California President’s Council on the National Laboratories, and on the Science & Technology, National Security and Intelligence committees for those laboratories. He served for a number of years on the National Research Council's Standing Committee on Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate and Review, and on the Committee on Defense Intelligence Agency Technology Forecasts and Reviews. He served on the National Research Council's Committee on Science and Technology for Defense Warning.
He was a member of the United States Army Laboratory Assessment Group and the United States Army Technology Objectives review panel.
He is a member of the Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
He is a member of JASON a group that brings together prominent scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and other agencies of the Executive Branch.

Research

Long's research interests include computer data storage, operating systems, distributed computing, and computer security. He has written highly cited research papers on
web caching,
distributed file systems,
power-aware hard disk management in mobile computing,
and low-bandwidth multicast techniques for video on demand,
among other topics.
In 1991, Long pioneered the idea of storing metadata separately from data in the Swift file system. This idea became a central design concept in subsequent distributed file and storage systems, such as IBM TotalStorage/SAN and Ceph. He is one of the pioneers in data deduplication and has authored many highly cited articles on the topic.

Awards and honors

Long became an IEEE Fellow in 2006 "for contributions to storage systems architecture and performance". In 2008 he was inducted as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.