Monday, June 1, 2015
David
R.
Cheriton
School
of
Computer
Science
alumnus Matei
Zaharia has
been
awarded
the
2014
ACM
Doctoral
Dissertation
Award
for
his
"innovative
solution
to
tackling
the
surge
in
data
processing
workloads,
and
accommodating
the
speed
and
sophistication
of
complex
multi-stage
applications
and
more
interactive
ad-hoc
queries,"
explains
a
press
release
by
the
Association
for
Computing
Machinery.
"[Zaharia's]
work
proposed
new
architecture
for
cluster
computing
systems,
achieving
best-in-class
performance
in
a
variety
of
workloads
while
providing
a
simple
programming
model
that
lets
users
easily
and
efficiently
combine
them. Zaharia
developed
Resilient
Distributed
Datasets
(RDDs).
As
described
in
his
dissertation,
An
Architecture
for
Fast
and
General
Data
Processing
on
Large
Clusters,
RDDs
are
a
distributed
memory
abstraction
that
lets
programmers
perform
computations
on
large
clusters
in
a
fault-tolerant
manner."
Zaharia
received
his
BMath
with
a
double
major
in
Computer
Science
and
Combinatorics
and
Optimization in
2007.
It
was
during
that
time
that
he
won
a
gold
medal
at
the
ACM
International
Collegiate
Programming
Contest
(ICPC).
In
2014,
Zaharia
was
awarded
the
Faculty
of
Mathematics
Young
Alumni
Achievement
Medal.
He
is
the
co-founder
of
a
red-hot
startup, Databricks.
Based
on
his
thesis
work
on
Spark,
an
open-source
system
for
big
data,
it
has
made
large-scale
data
manipulation
and
analysis
accessible
to
nearly
everyone.
Zaharia
will
receive
the
Doctoral
Dissertation
Award
and
its
$20,000
prize
at
the
annual
ACM
Awards
Banquet
on
June
20
in
San
Francisco.
Financial
sponsorship
of
the
award
is
provided
by
Google
Inc.