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Sanjay Ghemawat

American computer scientist (born 1966)

Sanjay Ghemawat (born 1966 in West Lafayette, Indiana) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group.2

From Wikipedia’s article on Sanjay Ghemawat (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born 1966.1

About

Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with Jeff Dean, has included big data processing model MapReduce, the Google File System, and databases Bigtable and Spanner. Wired has described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age". Ghemawat co-founded the AI research start-up Discovery Loop in 2026.

Ghemawat was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems.

From Wikipedia’s article on Sanjay Ghemawat, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

  • Date not recordedMassachusetts Institute of Technology3
  • Date not recordedCornell University3

Ghemawat was born in West Lafayette, Indiana and grew up in Kota, Rajasthan. He studied at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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 were Barbara Liskov and Frans Kaashoek.

Before joining Google, Ghemawat worked at the DEC Systems Research Center. There he began his long-time collaboration with Jeff Dean, who worked at another DEC research lab nearby. Their work at DEC included a Java compiler and a system profiling tool.

From Wikipedia’s article on Sanjay Ghemawat (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: computer scientist.6

After DEC was acquired by Compaq, many of its researchers left the company. Dean took a position at the newly founded search-engine company Google, 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:

Original design of Protocol Buffers, an open-source data interchange format.

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

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

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

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

LevelDB, an open-source on-disk key-value store.

TensorFlow, an open-source machine-learning software library.

Service Weaver, an open-source framework for writing distributed applications.

From Wikipedia’s article on Sanjay Ghemawat (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • Born1966, West Lafayette7
  • CitizenshipUnited States8

Awards

  • 2020ACM Fellow9 11
  • 2012ACM Prize in Computing9 10
  • Date not recordedFellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences9

Sources

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