Pat Helland ’76

Pat Helland arrived at UCI in September of 1973 as a math major and took his first college programming class, ICS 1, falling in love with programming. He eventually found part time work as an operator on the Dec PDP-10 and Xerox Sigma-7 within the ICS building. However, in December 1975, he left UCI to get a job to support his family.

In 1978, Helland got a programming job in Silicon Valley at BTI Computer Systems. Then, in July of 1982, he went to work at Tandem. There, he inherited major portions of a product called Transaction Monitoring Facility. TMF provided the database logging and recovery for the most successful fault-tolerant system of its time. The NonStop System was a message-based multiprocessor that provided extreme high availability and ran many stock exchanges, federal funds transfers and other major enterprises. Helland rewrote TMF, evolving it in place, to turn it from the least reliable portion of the NonStop System to the most reliable. At Tandem, Helland benefitted in countless ways from the guidance of Jim Gray who introduced him to presenting, writing, and the academic world.

Helland later moved to HaL Computer Systems, which was largely owned by Fujitsu. When it became apparent the efforts into advanced transaction processing were stuck behind the efforts in hardware design, he moved quickly to drive the architecture and design of the 64-bit Memory Management Unit for the SPARC V9 system. Once the MMU was into detailed design, Helland set out to build a scalable CC-NUMA (Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Architecture) multi-processor for SPARC V9. This was shipped by Fujitsu a few years later.

In 1994, Helland moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft, building an enterprise platform. He led the architecture for the first N-tier transactional system. Not much later, he started advocating programming models that would soon be known as service-oriented architectures. Starting in 2000, Helland drove the architecture and design of a high-performance, exactly-once, transactional messaging system called the SQL Service Broker. This system delivered as much as 180,000 transactionally correct messages per second.

Helland moved to Amazon in 2005, where he worked on distributed systems and service-oriented architecture. He helped with the initial design of the Dynamo storage system and worked on the Product Catalog team, a massively complex data transformation and collation system.

Returning to Microsoft in 2007, Helland worked to edit the SIGMOD record describing the lifetime achievements of his mentor, Jim Gray, who had recently gone missing at sea. Soon, he was working on enhancing COSMOS, the massively scalable big data analysis engine behind Bing. In 2012, he started at Salesforce, where he has been working on novel database, storage and datacenter architectures. Helland holds 31 US patents, has authored or coauthored over 20 papers, and writes a regular column for ACM Queue.