USA-2012
For their leadership in the science and engineering of Internet-scale distributed systems. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google's revolutionary software infrastructure, which has transformed the practice and understanding of Internet-scale computing. Their efforts, along with those of their collaborators, created the first software designs for systems that harness the power of tens of thousands of computers. Their designs for systems such as MapReduce and BigTable are remarkable for scalability, the grace with which they tolerate faults, and the ease with which they support the construction of many new distributed services. We are in a new age of Internet-scale computing thanks in significant measure to the engineering innovations of Dean and Ghemawat. Press Release
USA-2009
For contributions to the science and engineering of large-scale distributed computer systems.
From 1996 to 1999, I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, where I worked on low-overhead profiling tools, design of profiling hardware for out-of-order microprocessors, and web-based information retrieval. From 1990 to 1991, I worked for the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, developing software to do statistical modelling, forecasting, and analysis of the HIV pandemic.
In 2009, I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and I was also named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS).