Sanjay Ghemawat

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Sanjay Ghemawat is an American Indian software and computer scientist. He is a senior fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group at Google. Google’s Ghemawat work has largely involved the Big Data Processing Model MapReduce, the Google File System, and Bigtable and Spanner databases in close cooperation with Jeff Dean. Wired described him as one of the “most important Internet-era software engineers.”

Ghemawat studied at Cornell University and the Institute of Technology in Massachusetts. In 1995 he was awarded a PhD from MIT entitled The Modified Object Buffer: An Object-Orientated Database Storage Technique. Ghemawat worked at the DEC Systems Research Center before joining Google. His consultants were Barbara Liskov and Frans Kaashoek. He started there his long-term partnership with Jeff Dean, who worked in another DEC research laboratory in the vicinity. DEC works included a Java compiler and a tool for system profiling.

Many of its researchers left the company after DEC had been acquired by Compaq. Dean took over the newly established Google search engine company and joined Ghemawat in 1999. Both began to work on Google’s core infrastructure, which in the early 2000s had to deal with the rapid growth in popularity of the search engine.

MapReduce, a large-scale data processing system.

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

Spanner, a multi-version scalable, distributed and synchronized database

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

TensorFlow, a software library for open-source machine learning.

In 2009, Ghemawat was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and in 2016 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and Dean were awarded the ACM Award for their work in the field of internet infrastructure in 2012.