Mani Chandy

Kanianthra M. (Mani) Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1965, M.S. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1966, and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. Following his doctorate, he worked at Honeywell and IBM. From 1970 to 1988, he served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he chaired the Computer Science Department in 1978–1979 and 1983–1985. Chandy joined Caltech as Visiting Professor in 1988–1989, became Professor in 1989, Ramo Professor in 1997, and Emeritus in 2014. He was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in 1988, Executive Officer for Computer Science from 1997 to 2000, and Deputy Chair from 2009 to 2012. His career includes contributions to performance modeling, parallel and distributed computing, and sense-and-respond systems.

Professor Chandy's research centers on distributed systems, verification and validation of concurrent systems, and software packages for analyzing streams of data. He develops systems that sense and respond to seismic events, nuclear radiation threats, fetal distress, and power grid changes using sensor networks, cloud computing, event-driven architectures, optimization, control theory, machine learning, and game theory. Key publications include 'Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems' (1985, with Leslie Lamport), 'Open, Closed, and Mixed Networks of Queues with Different Classes of Customers' (1975, with F. Baskett et al.), 'Parallel Program Design' (1989 book, with J. Misra), and 'Computer Systems Performance Modeling' (1981, with C.H. Sauer). His work received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award (1995), election to the National Academy of Engineering (1995), Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (2014), Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (2017), and ACM Hall of Fame Award for the distributed snapshots paper. Chandy's foundational algorithms and models have shaped distributed computing, queueing network analysis, and parallel simulation.