Brian Foley
Principal CPU Architect at Huawei
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Foley is a Principal CPU Architect based in Cambridge with 13 years of deep experience spanning CPU architecture, system modeling, firmware and cloud virtualization. He has led architecture and implementation work at Huawei and Google after a long stint at ARM building executable CPU and platform models, and holds a PhD in computer science from Warwick. Brian combines low-level hardware expertise with hands-on systems and backend engineering—his open-source contributions include meaningful compiler and tooling work on the Bluespec compiler and performance-focused fixes to the well-known Ganeti VM cluster manager. He’s comfortable moving between JIT-powered CPU models, VMMs and fuzzing retro and modern systems alike, bringing a pragmatic research-driven approach to complex performance and correctness problems. Colleagues would describe him as an engineer who surfaces subtle microarchitectural issues into practical, maintainable engineering fixes.
12 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Computer Science, MSc Computer Science at The University of EdinburghBSc Maths/Computer Science, BSc Maths/Computer Science at University of GalwayPhD Computer Science, PhD Computer Science at University of Warwick
Github Skills (17)
c-language10
back-end-development10
architecture10
system10
compiler-design10
virtualization10
architectures10
cprogramming-language10
haskell10
verilog9
performance-optimization9
refactoring9
system-administration9
documentation8
build-system8
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
B-Lang-org/bsc
Feb 2020 - Nov 2020
Bluespec Compiler (BSC)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:154 commits, 120 PRs, 5 pushes in 9 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on improving the compilation process and the structure of the Bluespec compiler (BSC) project. Their contributions include fixing compiler diagnostics, refactoring code to handle default arguments in function declarations, and removing obsolete components such as the CUDD SAT solver. They also enhanced code maintainability by fixing implicit definition warnings and cleaning up unused code bindings. Additionally, the user refactored code related to system verilog pretty printing.
bsccompilerelectrical-engineeringhardwarebluespec
ganeti/ganeti
May 2014 - Jan 2017
Ganeti is a virtual machine cluster management tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other open source software.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:190 commits, 12 PRs, 17 comments in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the Ganeti virtualization cluster management tool, focusing on backend improvements. Their commits addressed performance issues by optimizing code and memory usage in the codebase, specifically related to job queue operations. Additionally, the user added features such as providing an option to pass a group name to the gnt-instance command. The user also made code improvements by refactoring code and updating the documentation.
pythoncluster-managementvirtualizationon-topmanagement-tool
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