Melbourne professor visits his college in Bidar

When Rajkumar Buyya came to the Karnataka College to deliver a speech in his alma mater in Bidar on Monday , it was a proud moment for all the teachers there.

He studied PUC in the Karnataka College in the late 1980s 


The professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at University of Melbourne, Australia, learned the basics of computer science during his pre-university course in this college in Bidar in the late 1980s.

The lad from Koutha village in Bidar taluk is now a researcher of global repute in the field of cloud computing.

Cloud computing
The Chinese have used his cloud computing platforms to design high speed trains, the Government of Inner Mongolia to strengthen its markets, ISRO to process satellite images, companies to reduce their computing costs and researchers are using them to collaborate. His work has won him two international awards.

His teachers feel he deserves all the recognition. “He is a genius who can think decades ahead of his peers,” says his mathematics teacher S.B. Sajjanshetty. “He has always been like this. Outstanding, yet humble,” says retired Professor S.S. Devarkal, who came to the college to meet him on Monday.

After his pre-university course, Prof. Buyya joined B.Sc. course in Karnataka College in 1988. He left for Mysore after he got an engineering seat there. He completed his Masters in Computer Science from University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering in Bangalore and joined the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in its super computer project, PARAM.

He later sought a teaching position in University of Melbourne in 1998. His theses on the economics of grid computing won him a doctor of philosophy from Monash University, Melbourne. He set up the cloud computing lab at the University of Melbourne and Manjrasoft, a commercial spin-off. The software programmes and platforms from Manjrasoft are now used in 40 countries.

‘Future of IT'

He says cloud computing is the future of IT. “It has immense potential for students, researchers and the industry. If we don't prepare our youth for it, we will be missing out on a great opportunity,” he said.

Prof. Buyya said he makes frequent trips to India as it was “hard to resist its pull”. It is not difficult to guess why he named his IT company after the river flowing through his village.


Source: The Hindu

URL:  http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/article2776433.ece