Sanjay Ghemawat

Ghemawat was an early employee at Google. He (with others) led the conception, design, and implementation of much of Google's revolutionary computing infrastructure. This infrastructure has allowed Google to grow gracefully over many orders of magnitude in as the company grew in scale and reach; and has led to the advent of cloud computing. Ghemawat played a central role in the creation of GFS (a file system to store large amounts of data), and with Dean created MapReduce (a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications) and BigTable (a large-scale semi-structured storage system used underneath a number of Google products). Ghemawat and Dean were the first to engineer distributed infrastructure that aggregate tens of thousands of computers into a single system.