Ali Ghodsi

Ali Ghodsi is a computer scientist and entrepreneur^[1] specializing in distributed systems and big data. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks, and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. Ideas from his academic research, in the area of resource management and scheduling and data caching, have been applied in popular open source projects such as Apache Mesos,^[2] Apache Spark,^[3] and Apache Hadoop.

Ghodsi received his PhD from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), advised by Seif Haridi. He was a co-founder of Peerialism AB, a Stockholm-based company developing peerialistic solutions to transport and store data on the Internet. He was also an assistant professor at the Royal Institute of Technology 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 Apache Mesos and Apache Spark. He also published "Dominant Resource Fairness",^[4] a paper that heavily influenced resource management and scheduling design in distributed systems such as Hadoop.^[5]

In 2013, he co-founded Databricks, a company that commercializes Spark.^[6] He became CEO of Databricks in January 2016.^[7]

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