Summary
Francois Abel is a senior research scientist at IBM Research Zurich with eight years focused on hardware–software co-design for high-performance and large-scale data center systems. He has led projects that bring accelerators and tapes into the cloud era—most notably the open-source cloudFPGA platform for disaggregated FPGA deployment and a cloud-native, scale-out prototype for magnetic tape libraries that integrates K3s, Ceph and NooBaa. His work spans from low-level networking and microserver topologies to orchestration and resilience engineering, combining hands-on cluster administration with system architecture. Francois excels at translating archival and accelerator hardware constraints into practical, deployable software stacks that improve scalability and reliability. He maintains active research profiles and openly shares artifacts used by other researchers, reflecting a commitment to reproducible systems research. An electrical-engineering trained engineer with decades of lab experience, he brings deep institutional knowledge of heterogeneous platforms to modern cloud-native storage challenges.
8 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Dipl.-Eng., Dipl.-Eng. at ENIBe - École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Belfort, France (now UTBM - Univ. Tech. de Belfort-Montbéliard)
Master of Science (MS), ISMEA - Institut Superieur de MicroElectronique Appliquee (now EMSE-ISMIN), Master of Science (MS), ISMEA - Institut Superieur de MicroElectronique Appliquee (now EMSE-ISMIN) at ESIM-ISMEA - Ecole superieure d'ingenieurs de Marseille, France (now EMSE-ISMIN)
english, french, german