Mendel Rosenblum is a computer scientist whose research turned virtualization from a mainframe-era idea into a practical technology for everyday hardware. His Stanford faculty page describes him as the “Cheriton Family Professor in the School Engineering with appointments in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments,” with research interests in “system software, distributed systems, and computer architecture.”
In the mid-1990s Rosenblum led the Disco project at Stanford. The resulting 1997 paper, “Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors,” written with Edouard Bugnion and Scott Devine, showed how a virtual machine monitor could run multiple unmodified operating systems on a large multiprocessor. His page notes that “VMware’s technical approach grew out of the Disco research project at Stanford University, led by Mendel Rosenblum.”
Rosenblum then helped turn that research into a company. His faculty page states that he is “a co-founder of VMware Inc” and that “as the Chief Scientist of VMware for the company’s first 10 years he helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms.” The key step was making virtualization work on commodity x86 machines, not just on specialized hardware.
He has continued to teach and research at Stanford alongside that industrial work, and the line of technology he helped start underpins much of how servers and clouds are run today.