Reynold Xin

Reynold Xin is a computer scientist and engineer specializing in big data, distributed systems, and cloud computing. He is a co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks. 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, which as of June 2016 is the top open-source Big Data project. He designed and lead development of the GraphX, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming components and he co-designed DataFrames—all of which are part of the core Apache Spark distribution—plus served as the release manager for Spark's 2.0 release. As of September 2016 he is also the most active contributor to Spark with over 1000 commits.

UC Berkeley

Xin started his work on the Spark open source project while he was a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley AMPLab.

The first research project, Shark, created a system that was able to efficiently execute SQL and advanced analytics workloads at scale. Shark won Best Demo Award at SIGMOD 2012. Shark was one of the first open source interactive SQL on Hadoop systems, with claims that it was between 10 and 100 times faster than Apache Hive. Shark was used by technology companies such as Yahoo, although it was replaced by a newer system called Spark SQL in 2014.

The second research project, GraphX, created a graph processing system on top of Spark, a general data-parallel system. GraphX at the same challenged the notion that specialized systems are necessary for graph computation. GraphX was released as an open source project and merged into Spark in 2014, as the graph processing library on Spark.

Databricks

In 2013, along with Matei Zaharia and other key Spark contributors, Xin co-founded Databricks, a venture-backed company based in San Francisco that offers data platform as a service, based on Spark.

In 2014, Xin led a team of engineers from Databricks to compete in the Sort Benchmark and won the 2014 world record in Daytona GraySort using Spark, beating the previous record held by Apache Hadoop by 30 times. Xin claimed that Spark was the fastest open source engine for sorting a petabyte of data.

While at Databricks, he also started the DataFrames project, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming. DataFrames has become the foundational API while Tungsten has become the new execution engine.