MPI-SWS faculty Peter Druschel has been honored as the eighth recipient of the Mark Weiser Award -- the top international award in the field of operating systems.

The Mark Weiser Award was established in 2001 by ACM's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems. Recipients must have begun their careers no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination, and they are selected based upon "contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser."

In the award ceremony, Peter's broad and high-impact contributions in his research field were highlighted, including work such as the Pastry peer-to-peer system, the Flash web server, the Fbufs operating system support for high-speed networking, and his work on resource management in large-scale servers.

Peter received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1994. He was a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, before accepting his current position as the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Previous recipients of the Mark Weiser Award are Frans Kaashoek (MIT), Mendel Rosenblum (Stanford), Mike Burrows (Google), Brian Bershad (Univ. of Washington), Tom Anderson (Univ. of Washington), Dawson Engler (Stanford), and Peter Chen (Univ. of Michigan)