Ali Ghodsi

Ali Ghodsi (born 1978) is an Iranian-Swedish-American computer scientist and entrepreneur , specializing in distributed systems, big data and data management. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. He coauthored several influential papers, including Apache Mesos and Apache Spark SQL.

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, in a paper that heavily influenced resource management and scheduling design in distributed systems such as Hadoop.

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

Education

2006, PhD, Computer Science, KTH/Royal Institute of Technology 2003, MBA, Logistics and Marketing, Mid-Sweden University 2002, MSc, Computer Engineering, Mid-Sweden University 1997, BSE, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests Ali Ghodsi received his PhD in 2006 from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in the area of Distributed Computing. His research interests include distributed systems, cloud computing, big data computing, and networking. Education 2006, PhD, Computer Science, KTH/Royal Institute of Technology 2002, MBA, Logistics and Marketing, Mid-Sweden University 2002, MSc, Computer Engineering, Mid-Sweden University