Nagui Halim

Team leader who developed System S—a computing system able to manage and analyze massive volumes of continuous streams of data—Halim was named an IBM Fellow in 2011, the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. His technical vision and leadership launched the era of stream computing at IBM. He has served as Director of InfoSphere Streams in IBM's Software Group's Information Management organization. He spent most of his 30-year career with IBM in the Research Division in a series of positions, from Software Engineer, Research staff member, and Manager to Senior Manager, Department Group Manager, and Director.

His technical areas of expertise included systems software, operating systems, transaction processing, fault-tolerant computing, distributed systems, programming languages, computer communications, and computer architecture. Among his contributions, the most important were in stream computing and large systems clustering.

In response to a Grand Challenge posed by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in 2003 to create a new architecture for high-speed adaptive stream processing and analytics, he recruited and assumed leadership of a large interdisciplinary research team, working in close and novel collaboration with DoD, to undertake this formidable project. The goal was to develop a new type of computing system able to manage and analyze massive volumes of continuous streams of data, which became known as System S. As the technical lead on System S, Halim developed the foundational concepts and designed the architecture for this new computing system, led the prototype effort, led the formal product development, and most recently led the commercialization effort and client enablement in numerous commercial segments, with the system moving into production. Both the U.S. and UK Departments of Defense maintained extensive deployments of this technology in their operations worldwide.

In previous years he played a pivotal role in the development of the System/390 Parallel Sysplex in a joint initiative with Enterprise Systems (ES) LOB, leading the Coupling Facility Control Program (CFCP) design and engineering effort. The CFCP was a hardware and software facility that turned an IBM mainframe Base Sysplex system into a Parallel Sysplex, a clustering architecture that allowed multiple smaller computers to operate in concert as one large image. It enabled data sharing with guaranteed integrity, extensive resource sharing, workload balancing, and continuous availability.