wolfgang richter

> whoami

I go by Wolf. You might find me online with the handle @theonewolf. I consider myself an experimental computer scientist, just like my advisor Satya. I'm currently a 4th year graduate student in the Computer Science Department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I blog for the ACM XRDS blog. Here is an oddly fitting Dilbert comic borrowing my name. If you're wondering, Wolfgang is a fairly common name, especially in Germany. I grew up in the US, und ich kann nur ein bißchen Deutsch sprechen.

I recently became an IBM Fellow and was awarded an IBM Fellowship for the upcoming academic year. I was previously supported by an NSF Fellowship, and recently honored with the 2012 Alan J. Perlis Graduate Student Teaching Award.

> cat research_statement

My research is developing general and scalable techniques for exploring the runtime and historic file system state of virtual machines (VMs). My specific focus is on performant solutions which incur low overhead, and scale well to tens of thousands of running instances or stored virtual disk snapshots. I develop two techniques exposing this state at scale: introspection, and retrospection.

Introspection means the capability to inspect virtual disk state while it is mutating—during VM execution.

Retrospection is a term meaning the capability to search and investigate frozen historic state of virtual disks in a central store. I am actively extending my work to VM memory.

Combined with the centralization of cloud computing, my work enables the development of previously impossible troubleshooting tools which provide insight into computational state across multiple executing VM instances, and enable tracking of the evolution of state in clouds.

> cat collaborators

I am lucky to have active collaboration with an excellent set of researchers, both at CMU and also external to CMU. At CMU I collaborate predominantly with:

During my tenure as a grad student, and for a summer internship in 2011, I have collaborated with researchers at IBM on distributed systems (cloud) research:

My forays into mobile research have led me to collaborate with researchers at Rice University:

as well as researchers at Duke University:

Other collaborators include:

> cat history

I come from the University of Virginia (SEAS '09, BS CS) where I was involved in distributed computing research. While at UVA, I worked and interacted predominantly with:

I was honored by several department awards while an undergrad including: the 2009 Louis T. Rader Undergraduate Research Award, the 2009 Outstanding Education Undergraduate Student and the 2009 Outstanding Service Undergraduate Student (all recorded online).

> fortune

Here are my two favorite quotes:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt (Paris Sorbonne,1910)
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level."
- Bruce Lee