Willy Zwaenepoel is dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Willy Zwaenepoel has worked in a variety of aspects of operating systems and distributed systems, including microkernels, fault tolerance, parallel scientific computing on clusters of workstations, clusters for web services, and mobile computing. He is most well known for his work on the Treadmarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intel’s OpenMP cluster product. His work on high-performance software for network I/O led to the creation of iMimic Networking, Inc, which he led from 2000 to 2005. His current projects include database replication, I/O performance of virtual machines, and software update mechanisms.

Before joining École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2002, Willy Zwaenepoel was on the faculty at Rice University, where he was the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in 2000.