Guru Parulkar has been in the field of networking for close to 20 years and has worked in academia, startups, a large company, and a top tier venture capital firm. He joined National Science Foundation (NSF) as a Program Director (October 2003) in its then newly created Computer and Network Systems Division.

 

Guru came to NSF to work with the broader research community and together make something “significant” happen.  Highlights of his first year at NSF include

• Creation of the new networking research program called Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) with Joe Evans, Admela Jukan, and Darleen Fisher
  

• Creation of a new program/focus area on Networking of Sensor Systems (NeTS NOSS). More details can be found at web sites for the first and second informational meeting including short presentations on the funded projects in FY2004.
  

Guru’s success in the world of startups includes Growth Networks that he co-founded with Jon Turner and Jerry Cox and served as its CTO and Director. Growth Networks is notable for many reasons including the following:

 

• Its switching and packet classification technologies are the foundation of Cisco’s next generation flagship router.

 

• It represents one of the best cases of NSF and DARPA funded research having a real commercial impact.
  
  
• It was acquired by Cisco Systems for over $350M in January 2000. At the time the acquisition represented a record in terms of building most value per employee in the shortest amount of time!!

 

Guru co-founded a couple of more high tech startups in the general area of networking, wireless and multimedia systems. These startups were funded and incubated by top tier venture firms such as New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley. He also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at NEA during 2001. He continues to serve as a technical advisor to several startups. 

 

At Cisco Guru led working groups on the system architecture and performance modeling of the next generation core router to help get Growth Networks technology absorbed in Cisco’s products. He also worked in the New Markets and Technologies group of Cisco’s Business Development organization.

 

Prior to startups, Guru was a Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis from 1987 to 1999. Highlights of this tenure include the following

 

• He worked closely with leaders such as Jon Turner, Jerry Cox, George Varghese, Doug Schmid, and others
  
  
• He got to closely observe the birth of fast packet switching (aka ATM): from ASICs to boards to switches to switch software to network software to multimedia and medical imaging applications to one of the first ATM metro area networks in the world.
    
• He served as a Director of Applied Research Laboratory, one of the best in its class.

 

• He initiated and led several large multi-investigator systems projects that led to exciting research.

 

• He worked with graduate students who produced significant research including the following systems that are/were used by others:
  
  
• VM of current NetBSD and FreeBSD Unix (Chuck Cranor).
  
  
• APIC gigabit network interface (Zubin Dittia and others).
  
  
• Router plug-in software (Dan Decasper and Zubin Dittia).
  
  
• Packet classification algorithms (Will Eatherton and Zubin Dittia)
  (Guru didn’t contribute to the scientific work).
  
  
• Packet striping algorithms (Hari Adiseshu).
  
  
• Multimedia on demand server and service (Milind Buddhikot).
  
  
• Real Time Upcall (RTU) system for QoS within the host (R. Gopal).
  
  

His other PhD students include James Sterbenz, Christos Papadopoulos, and Fengming Gong.

All his students continue to be active in research and industry and make significant contributions.

 

Highlights of Guru’s professional services include ACM SIGCOMM’99 PC Co-Chair, NOSSDAV’97 PC Chair, ACM/IEEE Transaction on Networking Technical and Publications Editor, IEEE Network Editor, and Co-Editor IEEE JSAC special issue on Gigabit Networking.

                               

Guru received Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 1987 (advisor: Professor Dave Farber). At the time UDEL was at the center of exciting developments in networking primarily due to Dave Farber and Dave Mills among others. These happenings had a profound effect on Guru’s thinking and later career. The highlights are:

 

• UDEL’s participation in and contribution to CSNET and NSFNET in terms of the vision, leadership, and technologies.
  
  
• UDEL’s key role in conceiving and then developing the gigabit networking research initiative that both NSF and DARPA funded at the national level.
  
  
• UDEL’s development of the first hardware based distributed shared memory system.
  
  
• Experimentation with the first TCP/IP stack on PCs then developed by Dave Clark’s group at MIT.
   

 

Guru is a recipient of an alumni outstanding achievement award and Frank A. Pehrson Graduate Student Achievement award in Computer and information Sciences from the University of Delaware.

 

Guru’s accomplishments are mostly a result of great people that he was fortunate enough to work with (or to be around). These include Dave Farber, Jon Turner, Jerry Cox, Ron Bernal, Dan Lenoski, George Varghese, Doug Schmidt, Adarsh Sethi, Paul Amer, Gary Delp, Bob Caviness, Dave Mills, Mike Miller, and of course a bunch of very good students.

 

You are welcome to an academic style web page (somewhat dated) for more details.