Ali Ghodsi
Ali Ghodsi, Iranian-born Swedish computer scientist, co-founder and CEO of Databricks since 2016, co-creator of Apache Spark, UC Berkeley adjunct professor, PhD from KTH, net worth about $7.6 billion.
Ashok Agrawala
Ashok Agrawala is a computer scientist who joined the University of Maryland in 1971 and worked on distributed systems, real-time computing, and indoor location, retiring in 2026.
Bill Thies
Bill Thies is an American computer scientist known for frugal technologies for global health and development, awarded a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship and formerly at Microsoft Research.
Boris D. Lubachevsky
Boris D. Lubachevsky was a Soviet-trained computer scientist at AT&T Bell Labs known for bounded-lag synchronization in parallel discrete-event simulation and the Lubachevsky–Stillinger algorithm for dense random particle packings.
Charles L. Seitz
Charles L. Seitz, known as Chuck Seitz, is an American computer scientist who built the Cosmic Cube, the first multicomputer, at Caltech and co-founded the interconnect company Myricom in 1994.
David Karger
David R. Karger is an American computer scientist and MIT professor since 1995, known for inventing consistent hashing, co-authoring the Chord distributed hash table, and randomized min-cut algorithms.
Eric Brewer (computer scientist)
Eric Brewer is an American computer scientist and UC Berkeley professor who joined Google as a vice president in 2012, known for originating the CAP theorem and co-founding Inktomi.
Flaviu Cristian
Flaviu Cristian (1951–1999) was a computer scientist who worked on fault-tolerant distributed systems at IBM and UC San Diego, best known for Cristian's algorithm for clock synchronization and for atomic broadcast.
Fred B. Schneider
Fred B. Schneider is an American computer scientist at Cornell University known for work on fault-tolerant distributed systems, security, and formal methods, including fail-stop processors.
Greg Bronevetsky
Greg Bronevetsky (Grigory Bronevetsky) is an American computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose research on supercomputer fault tolerance earned a Presidential Early Career Award in 2011.
Irene Greif
Irene Greif is an American computer scientist who founded the field of computer-supported cooperative work and was the first woman to earn a computer science PhD at MIT.
Jaswinder P. Singh
Jaswinder P. Singh, also known as Jaswinder Pal Singh, is an American computer scientist at Princeton University who works on parallel computing and computational biology.
Jayadev Misra
Jayadev Misra (born 1947) is an Indian-born American computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, known for the UNITY formalism and the Orc language.
Jennifer L. Welch
Jennifer Lundelius Welch is an American computer scientist known for research on distributed computing theory, and co-author of the widely used textbook Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics.
Kai Li
Kai Li (李凯) is a Princeton University computer scientist and National Academy of Engineering member known for distributed shared memory, deduplication storage, and co-leading ImageNet.
Leslie Lamport
Leslie Lamport, born 1941 in New York City, is an American computer scientist who developed LaTeX and won the 2013 ACM Turing Award for work on distributed systems.
Matei Zaharia
Matei Zaharia, Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, creator of Apache Spark (started 2009), cofounder and CTO of Databricks, and UC Berkeley EECS associate professor; RDD paper author, 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award winner, and recipient of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing (announced April 2026).
Maurice Herlihy
Maurice Herlihy is a computer scientist and An Wang Professor at Brown University who defined linearizability, proved the consensus hierarchy, introduced transactional memory, and won the Dijkstra Prize three times.
Michael Burrows (computer scientist)
Michael Burrows is a computer scientist who co-authored the 1994 Burrows–Wheeler transform, helped create the AltaVista search engine, and designed Google's Chubby lock service as a Distinguished Engineer.
Mike Cafarella
Mike Cafarella (Michael Cafarella) is an MIT CSAIL principal research scientist who co-created the Apache Nutch crawler and Hadoop distributed computing framework with Doug Cutting; University of Michigan professor 2009–2020, Lattice Data cofounder.
Neha Narkhede
Neha Narkhede (born 1985, Pune) is the Indian-American engineer who co-created Apache Kafka at LinkedIn and co-founded Confluent (acquired by IBM in 2026), its former CTO, now CEO of fraud-detection firm Oscilar and a Forbes-listed investor.
Nir Shavit
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist, professor at MIT and Tel Aviv University, known for software transactional memory and winning the 2004 Gödel Prize.
Sanjay Ghemawat
Sanjay Ghemawat, also Sanjay Ghemawat (Google Fellow, Discovery Loop cofounder), is an American computer scientist who co-created Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, and TensorFlow; born 1966, MIT PhD, left Google in 2026 to found Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean.
Stephan Ewen
Stephan Ewen, Berlin-based German engineer, co-creator of Apache Flink and Stratosphere, co-founder and CTO of data Artisans/Ververica, and founder of Restate (durable execution).
Sundararaja Sitharama Iyengar
Sundararaja Sitharama Iyengar is a computer scientist who works on distributed sensor networks and digital forensics at Florida International University, best known as co-inventor of the Brooks–Iyengar algorithm, a fault-tolerant sensor fusion method.
Virgilio A. F. Almeida
Virgilio A. F. Almeida is a Brazilian computer scientist and professor emeritus at UFMG, elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for work on distributed systems.