Bruce Nelson, PhD

Bruce J. Nelson was a computer scientist at Xerox PARC whose invention of the remote procedure call (RPC), developed during his doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University, became one of the foundational protocols of modern distributed computing. Nelson earned his undergraduate degree at Harvey Mudd College, then completed a master’s degree at Stanford University and his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. While pursuing his Ph.D., he worked at Xerox PARC, where he and collaborator Andrew Birrell developed the concept and implementation of RPC — a mechanism allowing programs in separate address spaces to call procedures on remote machines as transparently as local ones. Their 1984 paper, “Implementing Remote Procedure Calls,” published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, became a landmark of distributed systems research. He and Birrell received the 1994 ACM Software System Award for the work, and the paper was honored with an ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2007. Nelson later joined Cisco Systems as chief science officer in 1996. Harvey Mudd College established a distinguished speaker series in his name, and Carnegie Mellon created the Bruce Nelson Scholarship Fund in his memory.