Cantrill was born in Vermont, later moving to Colorado, where he attained the rank of
Eagle Scout. He studied
computer science at
Brown University, spending two summers at
QNX Software Systems doing kernel development. Upon completing his
B.Sc. in 1996, he immediately joined Sun Microsystems to work with
Jeff Bonwick in the
Solaris Performance Group. In 2005, Bryan Cantrill was named one of the 35 Top Young Innovators by
Technology Review,
MIT's magazine. Cantrill was included in the
TR35 list for his development of
DTrace, a function of the
OS Solaris 10 that provides a non-invasive means for
real-time tracing and diagnosis of
software. Sun technologies and technologists, including
DTrace and Cantrill, also received an
InfoWorld Innovators Award that year. In 2006, "The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in
The Wall Street Journals 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest." In 2008, Cantrill,
Mike Shapiro and
Adam Leventhal were recognized with the
USENIX Software Tools User Group (STUG) award for "the provision of a significant enabling technology." Together with Shapiro and Leventhal, Cantrill founded Fishworks, a stealth project within Sun Microsystems which produced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. He left Oracle on July 25, 2010, to become the Vice President of Engineering at
Joyent. He announced his transition to being
Chief Technology Officer at Joyent in April 2014, and held that position until announcing his departure as of July 31, 2019. He is now the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company. He was a member of the
ACM Queue Editorial Board. == Articles ==