Eric Barton
Chief Technical Officer and Co-founder, Whamcloud, Inc.

The Lustre roadmap has stabilized considerably over the past year, largely due to the efforts of Whamcloud. As a founding member and chief technical officer, Barton’s team has contributed considerable time and effort to the ongoing development of Lustre for HPC. While Lustre will continue to be a fundamentally open-source initiative, Barton’s leadership role at Whamcloud and in the Lustre User Groups, and through supporting community organizations such as OpenSFS and EOFS, has contributed greatly to the future of Lustre for 2012 and beyond.

Barton started Whamcloud as a founding member in 2010, with the objective to continue to promote Lustre on Linux as a vendor-neutral file system for HPC as a continuation of the role he played previously at Sun/Oracle as a Principal Engineer - Lead Engineer within the Lustre group. Barton’s vision was in fostering quality development and creating a shared long-term future for Lustre to ensure that it remains the most scalable and highest performing POSIX file system in HPC, and its core architectural features anticipate developments in storage systems for Exascale.

Barton originally joined Sun/Oracle in 2007 when it acquired CFS and his role rapidly expanded to working on the architecture for all of Lustre, and eventually to driving the technical leadership for the entire Lustre group, which enabled Barton to influence not only overall architectural direction, but also detailed technical issues, resourcing priorities, and working practices.

Prior to his role at Sun/Oracle, Barton devoted his focus on various aspects of architecture, design, development and leadership of Lustre from 2002-07, while employed as a consultant working with Cluster File Systems on all aspects of Lustre networking and I/O performance.

He was a founding member and Director of Software Development Meiko, Ltd. for ten years, and spent several years as an independent consultant focusing on programming systems for scalable, massively parallel computers. Barton earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Edinburgh University, and completed graduate work in Computer Science at California Institute of Technology with a focus on CAD and parallel processing.

In his off time Barton enjoys playing lead guitar for a 6-piece Reggae/Ska band called “The Bridge” in and around Bristol, UK, enjoys playing poker, and on the culinary side, recently discovered "Sous Vide" a French method of low temperature cooking.

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