Bio: IBM Distinguished Engineer, Bala Iyer, manager of the Advanced

Technology Development group at the IBM's Silicon Valley Lab, earned his

Masters and PhD from Rice University, winning the Best Thesis Award at the

university.  In the past has worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell

Labs in Murray Hill, NJ and as a Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson

Research Center, NY. He has devoted the last 15 years to R&D for IBM Data

Management products.  Bala is the co-architect of IBM z-Series server's

hardware compression facility, and compression software support in IBM's

DB2, IMS and VSAM software products.  Bala has contributed in numerous

other areas  including the data grid, data security and privacy,

application service provisioning, storage for Life Science, e-business, ERP

application performance, data mining, multidimensional analysis, SQL

optimization, database performance, high performance sorting and

synchronization algorithms for scalable database clustering, analytical

performance modeling, high speed network switching, and computer network

architecture.  Recently, he architected and built a special computing

system for the Protein Data Bank to store and process protein structure

data.  Bala has published extensively and has been granted over 50 US

patents.