Ali Ghodsi

Ali Ghodsi
BornDecember 1978 (age 45)
Iran[1][2]
CitizenshipSwedish
Alma materKTH Royal Institute of Technology (Ph.D.)
Known forApache Mesos, Apache Spark, Co-founding Databricks
TitleCEO of Databricks
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsDatabricks
UC Berkeley
ThesisDistributed k-ary System: Algorithms for Distributed Hash Tables (2006)
Doctoral advisorSeif Haridi
Websitewww.cs.berkeley.edu/~alig

Ali Ghodsi (born December 1978)[3] is a Swedish-American computer scientist and entrepreneur[4] of Persian origin, specializing in distributed systems and big data. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks[5][6][7] and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. He coauthored several influential papers, including Apache Mesos[8] and Apache Spark SQL.[9]

Ghodsi received his PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, advised by Seif Haridi. He was a co-founder of Peerialism AB, a Stockholm-based company developing a peer-to-peer data transfer system. He was also an assistant professor at KTH from 2008 to 2009.

He joined UC Berkeley in 2009 as a visiting scholar and worked with Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Michael Franklin, and Matei Zaharia on research projects in distributed systems, database systems, and networking. During this period, he helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects. He also co-invented the concept of Dominant resource fairness,[10] in a paper that heavily influenced resource management and scheduling design in distributed systems such as Hadoop.[11]

In 2013, he co-founded Databricks, a company that commercializes Spark, and became chief executive in 2016.[12][13]

  1. ^ Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO: A Fortt Knox Conversation. April 12, 2023 – via YouTube.
  2. ^ "Talks at GS with Ali Ghodsi". Goldman Sachs. July 16, 2021.
  3. ^ "Ali Ghodsi". Companies House. Retrieved March 8, 2024.
  4. ^ "Business Insider: The coolest people under 40 in Silicon Valley". Business Insider.
  5. ^ "Spark processing engine more at home in cloud, Databricks CEO says".
  6. ^ Andrea, Guzman (June 13, 2023). "These 13 A.I. innovators are deciding how the tech will change your life".
  7. ^ "Geek Of The Week: Ali Ghodsi, CEO Of Databricks". CloudWedge. 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-19.
  8. ^ "Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center" (PDF).
  9. ^ "Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark" (PDF).
  10. ^ "Dominant Resource Fairness: Fair Allocation of Multiple Resource Types".
  11. ^ "Hadoop MapReduce Next Generation - Fair Scheduler".
  12. ^ "Former SICS-researcher Ali Ghodsi new CEO of Databricks". RISE web site. January 13, 2016. Retrieved May 6, 2017.
  13. ^ "Databricks Announces Changes in Leadership Team to Align With Rapid Growth". Press release. January 11, 2016. Retrieved May 6, 2017.