Michael Armbrust
| Michael Armbrust | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Alma mater |
UC Berkeley (Ph.D.) Purdue University (B.S.) |
| Thesis | Scale-Independent Relational Query Processing (2013) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Michael J. Franklin David Patterson Armando Fox |
| Known for | Apache Spark |
Michael Armbrust is an American computer scientist and engineer specializing in distributed systems, large-scale structured storage, and query optimization. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of Big Data and open source software at conferences. He is best known for his work on Apache Spark and his research paper "A View of Cloud Computing".
Armbrust received his PhD from UC Berkeley AMPLab and RADLab, advised by Michael Franklin, David Patterson, and Armando Fox. His thesis focused on building systems that allow developers to rapidly build scalable interactive applications, and specifically defined the notion of scale independence.[1] At Berkeley, he also authored a seminal survey paper titled "A View of Cloud Computing", the most cited paper in cloud computing on Google Scholar with over 10,000 citations.[2]
He joined Google in 2013 as a post-doc and focused his research on creating a new modular query optimizer for the Spanner project.
He then joined Databricks in 2014, where he started the Catalyst open source query optimizer. Based on Catalyst, he also created the Spark SQL project, an engine for structured data processing and SQL on Spark. Spark SQL is the most widely used library on top of Spark,[3] and has also been used in other prominent research projects, such as "GenAp: a distributed SQL interface for genomic data".[4]