Sanjay Ghemawat (born 1966 in

West Lafayette, Indiana West Lafayette () is a city in Wabash Township, Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, about northwest of the state capital of Indianapolis and southeast of Chicago. West Lafayette is directly across the Wabash River from its sister city, ...

) is an

Indian American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

. He is currently a Senior

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with

Jeff Dean Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he is the lead of Google AI, Google's AI division. Education Dean received a B.S., ''summa cum laude'', from the University o ...

, has included

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

processing model

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

, the

Google File System Google File System (GFS or GoogleFS, not to be confused with the GFS Linux file system) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware. Goo ...

, and databases

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Googl ...

and

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as nuts and bolts—or keep them from turning. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zeala ...

. ''Wired'' have described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age". Ghemawat was elected as a member into the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 2009 for contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems.

Education and early career

Ghemawat studied at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT). He obtained a PhD from MIT in 1995, with a dissertation titled, ''The Modified Object Buffer: A Storage Management Technique for Object-Oriented Databases.'' His

advisors An adviser or advisor is normally a person with more and deeper knowledge in a specific area and usually also includes persons with cross-functional and multidisciplinary expertise. An adviser's role is that of a mentor or guide and differs categor ...

were

Barbara Liskov Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the development of the Liskov ...

and

Frans Kaashoek Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek (born 1965, Leiden) is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for cont ...

. Before joining Google, Ghemawat worked at the

DEC Systems Research Center The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer ...

. There he began his long-time collaboration with

, who worked at another DEC research lab nearby. Their work at DEC included a

Java compiler A Java compiler is a compiler for the programming language Java (programming language), Java. The most common form of output from a Java compiler is Java class files containing platform-neutral Java bytecode, but there are also compilers that outp ...

and a system profiling tool.

Career at Google

After DEC was acquired by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

, many of its researchers left the company. Dean took a position at the newly founded search engine company

, and was joined by Ghemawat in 1999. The two began working on Google's core infrastructure, making improvements to cope with the search engine's rapid growth in users in the early 2000s. Ghemawat's work at Google includes: *

, a system for large-scale data processing applications. *

, is a proprietary distributed file system developed to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware. *

, a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database *

, a large-scale semi-structured storage system. *

TensorFlow TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learning ...

, an open-source machine-learning software library.

Awards and honors

Ghemawat was elected to the

in 2009, and to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 2016. In 2012, he and Dean received the

ACM Prize in Computing The ACM Prize in Computing was established by the Association for Computing Machinery to recognize individuals for early to mid-career innovative contributions in computing. The award carries a prize of $250,000. Financial support is provided by a ...

for their work on internet infrastructure, and the ACM

SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award The ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) Mark Weiser Award is awarded to an individual who has shown creativity and innovation in operating system research. The recipients began their career no earlier than 20 years prior to nom ...

Selected publications

* * * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ghemawat, Sanjay 1966 births Living people American people of Indian descent American computer scientists American software engineers Digital Equipment Corporation people Google employees Google Fellows Cornell University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Recipients of the ACM Prize in Computing