Anujan Varma is a Professor and Graduate Director in the Computer Engineering Department at UCSC. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California. He was previously employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1986 to 1991.
Professor Varma has worked on the architecture design and implementation of a variety of switches, including IP routers, ATM switches, Ethernet switches and SAN switches. His current research interests include high-speed switching and routing, optical networks, traffic scheduling and congestion control. He has published more than 100 papers in these areas and holds ten U.S. patents with more than 20 applications pending.
Prof. Varma has received several awards including the NSF Young Investigator Award, the IEEE Darlington Award for the best paper published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems during 1990-’91, and a Teaching Innovation Award from the University of California. He has served on the program committees of several conferences including ACM SIGCOMM and IEEE INFOCOM.
Prof. Varma’s research has received research funding from DARPA, NSF, Department of Energy and several companies. His research has had a significant impact on the networking industry. His work on the SWANET (Self-routed Wavelength-Addressable NETwork) project (a collaborative project with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley) led to the successful demonstration of a wavelength-routed optical switch. The resulting patent has been licensed by leading companies. His research in traffic scheduling and ATM congestion control have also led to influential products. He co-invented Starting Potential-based Fair Queueing (SPFQ), a key scheduling algorithm used by Lucent Technologies (now Agere Systems) in their popular ATLANTA switch fabric chipset. He is also the co-inventor of a rate allocation algorithm for supporting Available Bit-Rate (ABR) service in ATM switches, that has been licensed by ATM switch vendors. Dr. Varma has consulted extensively for the networking industry, including Lucent technologies, Cisco Systems, Intel, Broadcom and Bay Networks.
During 2000-2002, Dr. Varma founded TeraOptic Networks, a fabless semiconductor company, with funding from Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures. There he led the architecture design and implementation of a terabit-scale switch fabric chipset for high-end routers and switches. In 2002 the company successfully demonstrated a 640 Gb/s system based on its first-generation switch fabric chipset. The company’s intellectual property was later acquired by Intel Corporation. The company also received a “Fabless Start-up of the Year” Award from the Fabless Semiconductor Association in 2001.