Kyril Faenov Endowed Scholarship

Kyril Faenov was an entrepreneur, technologist and executive with an 18 year track record of global impact in the high technology industry. Kyril's aim was to build sustainable enterprises that delivered innovative, scalable solutions in the areas of scientific and technical computing, health and wellness, and education.

Kyril was a General Manager at Microsoft Corporation, leading the Technical Computing Group which encompassed Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform and Windows HPC Server. Kyril founded the High Performance Computing business unit in 2004 and led the development of the Windows HPC Server product and world-wide industry and academic partnerships. His prior contributions at Microsoft included leading the planning for Windows Server 2008, co-founding a distributed systems project in the office of the CTO, driving cross-company strategic initiatives as a technical advisor to the Platforms Group Vice President, and developing the Network Load Balancing scale-out technology in Windows 2000.

Kyril joined Microsoft in 1998 as the result of Microsoft's acquisition of Valence Research, an Internet server clustering startup he co-founded with his colleague and mentor Bill Bain and grew to profitability by securing MSN, Microsoft.com and some of the world's other largest web sites as its clients. He was a principal technical member of two other parallel systems startups, as well as a software consultant to Intel on a variety of embedded and performance simulation projects.

Kyril received his BS from the Rochester Institute of Technology and his MS from the Oregon Graduate Institute, concentrating in distributed systems and computational finance. He received an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Washington.

He grew up in Moscow, Russia, where he trained with the Olympic Reserve swim team and studied physics and mathematics. Before his untimely death in 2012 he resided in Seattle, Washington with his wife Lauren Selig and two daughters, Avery and Pasha Faenov.

For 12 years preceding his passing, Kyril had been active in Seattle entrepreneurship community as an angel investor and advisor to various early stage startups, and as a member of the Alliance of Angels Screening Committee, Social Venture Partners, and the advisory board of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

In his honor, Microsoft's entry in the 2012 “Top500” HPC competition, an Azure cloud supercomputer, was named the "Faenov Cluster." Quoting from a press article at the time, "Microsoft morphs HPC efforts into 'Big Compute'":

Microsoft also set up a virtual cluster and ran the Linpack test on it again. It is called Faenov, in homage to Kyril Faenov, who used to lead Microsoft's HPC efforts before he died in May 2012.

Microsoft posted a wonderful interview with Kyril in 2010 as part of the "Modeling the World" initiative of the Technical Computing Group in which his personality and capability shine through. The Kyril Faenov Endowed Scholarship is a lasting tribute to this remarkable person.