Guru Parulkar has been in the field of networking for more than 20 years and has worked in academia, startups, a large company, a top tier venture capital firm, and a federal funding agency (NSF). 

Stanford University

Guru joined Stanford University on August 1st, 2007 as the Executive Director of its new research program on the Clean Slate Design of the Internet and as a Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering. 

NSF
 
Guru joined NSF in August 2003 to work with the broader research community and together make something “significant” happen. Highlights of his tenure at NSF include the following:
 
·   Drove technical direction, with tremendous help and guidance from the research community and CISE leadership, of the GENI Initiative that is aimed at creating Future Internet.

·   Initiated several planning grants leading to community workshops that articulated compelling research agendas and experimental facility requirements in different areas of networking and distributed systems leading up to the GENI initiative.

·   Championed and created, with help from the community and with Darleen Fisher at NSF, a new research program on Future Internet Design (FIND).

·   Drafted the new network systems research program solicitation for FY 2004, 2005, 2006 (approximately $40M a year in funding) with Joe Evans, Admela Jukan, and Darleen Fisher.
 
·   Championed and created, with help from the community, a new research program on networking of sensor systems that led to approximately $11-12M in funding in FY 2004 and 2005.
 
Guru received NSF Director’s award for Program Management Excellence in 2006. 

Guru co-chaired Networking Research Team (NRT) of the inter-agency group called Large Scale Networking (LSN) since late 2003 and also served on NLR (National Lambda Rail) Network Research Council during FY 2005.
 
More information on GENI can be found at www.geni.net.
 
STARTUPS
 
Guru’s success in the world of startups includes Growth Networks that he co-founded 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.
 
Guru served on the board of a network security company called NetSift that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005.
 
Guru co-founded a multimedia wireless company called Sceos Technologies that was seed funded and incubated at Sequoia Capital. He served as its CTO and member of the board. Sceos has evolved to be Ruckus Wireless.
 
Guru played a key role in founding of a network security company called Nevis Networks. He brought the founding team together and created the business plan that led to seed funding of the company.
 
Guru served as a member of the Technical Advisory Board at Jibe Networks from its founding to acquisition by Orbital Data.
 
Guru is a nominated charter member of TiE Washington DC.
 
Guru also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at NEA during 2001 and received its Entrepreneurship award in 2001 for Growth Networks. 

Guru continues to serve as a technical advisor to several startups. 
 
After acquisition of Growth Networks, Guru led working groups on the system architecture and performance modeling of the next generation core router to help get Growth Networks technology absorbed into Cisco’s products. He also worked in the New Markets and Technologies group of Cisco’s Business Development organization.
 
ACADEMIA
 
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.http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/http://www.nsf.gov/cise/geni/http://www.nsf.gov/cise/geni/wsr.jsphttp://find.isi.edu/http://www.cise.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_display.cfm?pub_id=13075&div=cnshttp://toilers.mines.edu/noss/http://www.itrd.gov/iwg/lsn/nrt/http://www.itrd.gov/iwg/lsn.htmlhttp://www.geni.net/http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=76331http://www.ruckuswireless.com/http://www.nevisnetworks.com/http://www.jibenetworks.com/http://www.orbitaldata.com/http://www.tie-dc.org/http://www.nea.com/http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~jst/http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~jrc/http://www.shv.com/bernal.htmlhttp://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~varghese/http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/http://www.cis.udel.edu/~sethi/http://www.cis.udel.edu/~amer/http://www.cis.udel.edu/~caviness/http://www.ee.udel.edu/~mills/http://cis.jhu.edu/people/faculty/mim/mim.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3shapeimage_1_link_4shapeimage_1_link_5shapeimage_1_link_6shapeimage_1_link_7shapeimage_1_link_8shapeimage_1_link_9shapeimage_1_link_10shapeimage_1_link_11shapeimage_1_link_12shapeimage_1_link_13shapeimage_1_link_14shapeimage_1_link_15shapeimage_1_link_16shapeimage_1_link_17shapeimage_1_link_18shapeimage_1_link_19shapeimage_1_link_20shapeimage_1_link_21shapeimage_1_link_22shapeimage_1_link_23shapeimage_1_link_24shapeimage_1_link_25shapeimage_1_link_26
Guru Parulkar
NSF
 
Startups
 
Academia