Olivier Tardieu

I am a Principal Research Scientist and Manager at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA.

My research focuses on making developers more productive with better programming models, methodologies, and tools. Today I work primarily on cloud-related technologies, including Serverless Computing and Kubernetes, as well as their application to Machine Learning and AI workloads.

I enjoy building experimental software systems and sharing them with the community. I am an Apache contributor and a founding member of the Apache OpenWhisk Project Management Committee.

Since joining IBM Research in 2007, I have worked on a number of projects:

• X10 programming language: I lead the runtime design and implementation for the X10 programming language, conducting research on the scheduling of concurrent and distributed applications at petascale. I coauthored the X10 specification, and organized the X10 workshop at PLDI for several years.
• KAR: I lead the KAR project to develop an open, polyglot, fault-tolerant service mesh for the hybrid cloud.
• OpenWhisk: I developed OpenWhisk composer a framework for the serverless composition of serverless functions, now part of the IBM Cloud Functions service.
• Other: I co-designed a number of domain-specific programming models and languages including ActiveSheets, a spreadsheet interface for stream programming, CloudLens, a programming model for log analysis, SolSA, a TypeScript library to manage infrastructure as code for Kubernetes, Rayvens, to bring event and stream processing to Ray, and the APGAS library for fault-tolerant distributed programming in Java.

In 2005-2006, as a post-doc at Columbia University in the group of Prof. S.A. Edwards, I contributed to the design and implementation of the SHIM programming language and conducted research on deterministic parallel programming models.

I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2004 from Ecole des Mines de Paris and INRIA Sophia Antipolis under the supervision of Gérard Berry and Robert de Simone. My thesis focused on the semantics and compilation of the Esterel programming language.