Urs Hölzle

Urs Hölzle is Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. In this capacity Urs oversees the design, installation, and operation of the servers, networks, and datacenters that power Google's services. Through efficiency innovations, Urs and his team have reduced the energy used by Google data centers to less than 50% of the industry average. Urs is renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's top dog).

Urs grew up in Switzerland and received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and, as a Fulbright scholar, a Ph.D. from Stanford. While at Stanford (and then a small start-up that was later acquired by Sun Microsystems) he invented fundamental techniques used in most of today's leading Java compilers. Before joining Google he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.

Google Publications

Brawny cores still beat wimpy cores, most of the time

Urs Hölzle

IEEE MICRO (2010)
The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines

Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle

Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2009)
The Case for Energy-Proportional Computing

Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle

IEEE Computer, vol. 40 (2007)
High-efficiency power supplies for home computers and servers

Urs Hölzle, Bill Weihl

Google (2006), pp. 1-3
Monkey See, Monkey Do: A Tool for TCP Tracing and Replaying

Yu-Chung Cheng, Urs Hölzle, Neal Cardwell, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker

USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track (2004)

Previous Publications

Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture

Luiz Andre Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, Urs Hölzle

IEEE Micro, vol. 23 (2003), pp. 22-28
Eliminating Virtual Function Calls in C++ Programs

Gerald Aigner, Urs Hölzle

ECOOP (1996), pp. 142-166
Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization

Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, David Ungar

PLDI (1992), pp. 32-43
Object, Message, and Performance: How They Coexist in Self

David Ungar, Randall B. Smith, Craig Chambers, Urs Hölzle

IEEE Computer, vol. 25 (1992), pp. 53-64
Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages With Polymorphic Inline Caches

Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, David Ungar

ECOOP (1991), pp. 21-38
Organizing Programs Without Classes

Craig Chambers, David Ungar, Bay-Wei Chang, Urs Hölzle

Lisp and Symbolic Computation, vol. 4 (1991), pp. 223-242
Parents are Shared Parts of Objects: Inheritance and Encapsulation in SELF

Craig Chambers, David Ungar, Bay-Wei Chang, Urs Hölzle

Lisp and Symbolic Computation, vol. 4 (1991), pp. 207-222

Urs Hölzle

Co-Authors

Google Publications

Previous Publications