MIT Physics alum, Larry Votta admits that he still thinks of himself as a physicist – even though he has not published an article in Physical Review Letters or Physics Review since 1985.

“Okay, I did publish an article in Physics Today in January 2006,” But I was still trying to answer a question that Professors Louis Osborne and Jerome Friedman asked of me at my thesis defense in June of 1979: how did I know that my software programs were correct?”

If you want to hear how Larry answered this question and where it has led him over the last 27 years, come listen to “my journey and my tenuous generalizations of the true nature of physics and the modern physics career!”

Lawrence Votta , Ph.D. Larry is a recent member of the Sun Customer Advocates for Reliability (SunCARE) group. He was one of Sun Microsystems' four principal investigators for DARPA's High Productivity Computing System (HPCS) initiative and led the Productivity analysis teams. He also worked jointly with Kenny Gross in the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability Computer Analysis Laboratory (RASCAL) to develop and improve telemetry of complex systems for predictive transient and permanent failure analysis.

Dr. Lawrence Votta received his B.S. degree in Physics from the University of Maryland in 1973, and his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.  He joined Sun Microsystems as a Distinguished Engineer in December 2001, working to improve the software and system reliability and availability of Sun's products, while pursuing his research interest in high availability computing and empirical software engineering.

He has authored or co-authored more than 60 papers and chapters of 2 books in software engineering and 10 papers in nuclear and high energy physics. His work spans both software engineering and computer architecture. He has been granted 5 patents and 4 other pending with Kenny Gross for predictive transient and permanent failure analysis using telemetry of software and hardware states of a computer system.