Rate My Professor Darrell Long

Darrell Long is a distinguished Computer Science professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Distinguished Research Professor of Engineering in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. He holds the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems Research and was the founding Director Emeritus of the Storage Systems Research Center, which trained more than forty Ph.D. students and gained international recognition for advancements in storage architecture, reliability, and secure systems. Long received his B.S. in Computer Science from San Diego State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. His career at UCSC exceeds three decades, including positions as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. He has held visiting professorships at Université Paris–Dauphine, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Université Paris–Descartes, Sorbonne Université, University of Technology Sydney, and Universidad Católica del Uruguay, and serves as an Associate Member of CERN. Long has contributed to national advisory roles, including the UC President’s Council on the National Laboratories, National Research Council committees, and the JASON advisory group since 2002.

Long's academic interests center on data storage systems, distributed computing systems, operating systems, mobile computing, performance evaluation, reliability and fault tolerance, and computer security, with emphases on high-performance storage, archival storage, energy-efficient storage, and applied machine learning. His influential research has impacted scalable storage solutions, including collaborations with IBM Research leading to TotalStorage/SAN products and key architecture for the Ceph distributed file system. Notable publications include "Ceph: A scalable, high-performance distributed file system" (2006), "Extreme binning: Scalable, parallel deduplication for chunk-based file backup" (2009), "Secure data deduplication" (2008), "Deep Store: An archival storage system architecture" (2005), and "Valet: Efficient Data Placement on Modern SSDs" (2025, Best Paper Award at ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing). He founded the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST) in 2002, served as editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Storage and IEEE Letters of the Computer Society, and holds multiple patents. Long is an IEEE Fellow (2006) for contributions to storage systems architecture and performance and an AAAS Fellow (2008).