ACM salutes Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia with $250K prize

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine.

The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose work has had a broad and lasting impact. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by an endowment from tech services and consultancy company Infosys.

Few would insist Zaharia needs the money right now, though. After developing Apache Spark as part of his PhD at UCL Berkley, Zaharia went on to co-found Databricks, which provides an analytics and machine learning platform based on Spark and other technologies. The company has an estimated value of $130 billion.

Zaharia has helped develop a number of other open source projects, including Delta Lake, an open source storage framework governed by the Linux Foundation, and MLflow ...