Hi there!
The Short-Bio:
I’m Ian F. Adams, a computer scientist and software engineer who works primarily around storage and distributed systems, with some work on data pipelines and telemetry analysis blended in. I received a PhD in computer science in 2013 from UC Santa Cruz’s Storage Systems Research Center under Ethan Miller, working on a variety of projects around understanding and designing archival storage systems.
Currently, I work as a research scientist for Intel Labs, in the Advanced Storage Research group, where not surprisingly, I work on storage systems. Lately, I’ve been focused on computational storage, and analyzing storage stacks and workloads to improve efficiency and performance for a variety of applications.
Feel free to checkout and contact me through my LinkedIn Profile. I’ve also got a profile on Google Scholar, which has links to most of my publications, which are also mostly here on this website as well. I do have a little bit on GitHub, but due to the nature of my current work, it’s not frequently updated.
When I’m not doing the day-job-thing, I build things of the wood variety, and even occasionally sell some of them, with my wife and partner in crime.
The Long-ish Professional-ish Bio:
Determined to know about me?
I’ve bounced around a bit in life. My entire family is from the Chicago Metro area, but somehow I managed to be born in Mississippi and grow up in rural Eastern Oregon, specifically Pendleton.
I did my undergrad in computer science at Linfield College, which was an interesting experience, particularly the ups and downs of getting a degree from an extremely small computer science department.
During my time at Linfield, I interned at Micron Technologies in Boise Idaho and was left with an odd desire to keep going on in my education. I wound up at UC Santa Cruz for my MS degree in 2007. Though I had no intention of getting a PhD at the time, a friend introduced me to Ethan Miller, who was looking for new students for his storage system lab, and managed to convince me to transfer to the PhD program. I wound up on a path exploring long-term storage (aka archival storage) architectures and access patterns, with some diversions into validating instrumentation on storage systems, some poking at index designs for file systems, and looking at applications of data provenance.
During my time at UC Santa Cruz I also worked frequently with Thomas Kroeger, from Sandia National Labs, on a variety of projects around reliability and monitoring in extreme scale systems.
Once I finished up my PhD in 2013, I accepted a position at a small company called E-Vault, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, working with a group on standing on a cloud-based, long-term archival storage system service. While there I got to work on a variety of projects, ranging from creating a scale-out, on-demand checksumming service for customers to validate their remotely stored data, to large-scale telemetry gathering and analysis projects.
After a couple years there, my partner (now wife) and I decided it was time to move north and back up to Oregon—She’d actually been living there on and off for years while I was firmly planted in the bay area. Through some good luck, I wound up in touch with some folks at Intel Labs who happened to both A) work in storage and B) be hiring. With that, I decided it was time to jump back from pure applied work in industry back into research, with the added benefit of letting me move back to Oregon.
While working at Intel, I’ve generally been poking around in the areas of efficient, large-scale object storage systems, and computational storage.
Ian Forrest Adams 