Mendel Rosenblum

Designer and builder of virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms, Rosenblum co-founded VMware in 1998 and served as its Chief Scientist for the company's first 10 years. He received his B.A. degree in Math from the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1984, and holds an M.S. degree (1989) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1991), both from the University of California, Berkeley. While at UVA, he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa.

In 1998, Rosenblum, along with Diane Greene, Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion, founded VMware. VMware was the leader in virtualization software, which allows servers to run many operating systems and applications at the same time. As Chief Scientist of VMware for the company's first 10 years, he helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms. On September 10, 2008, Rosenblum resigned from VMware after his wife Diane Greene was terminated as the company's CEO.

At Stanford, his research group developed SimOS. His research interests have included system software, distributed systems, and computer architecture. Rosenblum has published research in the area of disk storage management, computer simulation techniques, scalable operating system structure, virtualization computer security, and mobility. From 2012, he has served as Faculty Director of the Stanford Computer Forum and Faculty Director of the Stanford Experimental Data Center Laboratory.

Rosenblum has been a recipient of several awards. In 1992, he received the National Science Foundation's National Young Investigator Award and was co-winner of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He received the 2002 ACM/SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for creativity and innovation in operating systems research, and in 2009 was a co-winner of the ACM System Software Award. In 1994, Rosenblum received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He was an IEEE Computer Society 2011 Computer Entrepreneur Award recipient "For creating a virtualization platform that profoundly revolutionized modern computing." From 2008, he has served as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to reinventing virtual machines." He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Rosenblum is the co-holder of numerous patents, a few of which are: "Virtual appliance management" (2011); "Context-switching to and from a host OS in a virtualized computer system" (2010); "Cache-based system management architecture with virtual appliances, network repositories, and virtual appliance transceivers" (2008); and "Virtual machine monitors for scalable multiprocessors" (2000).