Jim Plank (T2) is a professor in the EECS department at the University of Tennessee. He has done research on fault-tolerant computing and storage systems for over 20 years. For the past eight years, his sole focus has been on the design, implementation, and performance of erasure codes in storage systems. He has published numerous papers on the topic, including a very popular tutorial on Reed-Solomon codes and a complete treatment of Minimum Density codes for RAID-6. His open-source libraries for Galois Field arithmetic and for general erasure-coding have been in widespread use by industry and academia.
