Amin Vahdat | |
|---|---|
| Occupations | VP and GM of AI and infrastructure at Google |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Thomas E. Anderson |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Computer science |
| Institutions | Duke University University of California,San Diego |
| Main interests | Network architecture,network management,software-defined networking |
Amin Vahdat is an American computer scientist and business executive. He is vice president and general manager of AI and infrastructure at Google. [1] Before joining Google,he was a computer science professor at University of California,San Diego and Duke University. His academic work has focused on network architecture and software-defined networking.
Vahdat earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California,Berkeley in 1992,followed by a Ph.D. in computer science in 1998. His advisor was Thomas E. Anderson. [2]
As a computer scientist at Duke University, [3] in 2003 Vahdat and a colleague developed and released ModelNet,a software equivalent of a scale model of the internet for testing new programs in order to optimize research provisioning in large networked systems. [4] He also taught Advanced Computer Networks as a professor at Duke. He was promoted to tenure in July 2003. [5]
Vahdat held the Science Applications International Corporation chair in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of California,San Diego, [6] where he worked from 2004 to 2013. [7] He was also professor of computer science and engineering and director of the university's center for networked systems. [8] He presented research in 2008 explaining how the fundamentals of clustered computing could reduce costs and improve performance when applied to network architecture. [9]
In 2009,Vahdat was a co-author on a paper demonstrating that hierarchical networking structures performed worse than networks run at one shared speed,showing a more cost-effective approach to building networks at scale. Uniform networking became a common approach at major web operations. [10] [11] The ideas in the paper unintentionally paralleled work already underway at Google. [12]
While at UCSD,Vahdat was a primary researcher on Helios,a project that built a pair of test networks to demonstrate switching between traditional electrical networking and optical networking to speed data transfers between servers. [10] [13]
In 2010,Vahdat joined Google as technical lead for networking, [8] a role he held until 2019. [14] His work focused on network architecture for both data centers and wide area networks. [6] Vahdat's team at Google developed software-defined networking (SDN) to scale data center bandwidth, [15] with the first deployment in 2010. [16] A 2013 paper in SIGCOMM coauthored by Vahdat described how Google designed and created this network. [16] [17] In 2023,the Association for Computing Machinery gave this paper its "Test of Time" award. [18]
In a 2014 SIGCOMM paper,Vahdat and coauthors described the P4 programming language and proposed that it play a role in SDN protocols; [19] this paper also won the Test of Time award,in 2024. [18] He joined Jennifer Rexford and Nick McKeown as a board member of the P4 Language Consortium (P4.org) in July 2016. [20] By 2015,Vahdat was also a Google Fellow. [21] He oversaw the company's design [12] and development of network equipment tailored to its own data center and wide area needs. [22] Vahdat's leadership of networking at Google grew to include compute and storage as well. [8] In 2021,when he was vice president for systems infrastructure, [23] he shared that Google had begun developing custom SoCs. [24] [25]
Vahdat leads Google's efforts to develop its own AI chips. [26] He oversaw the company's work to develop Axion,a proprietary AI chip,in 2024, [27] and Google's seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit,Ironwood,in 2025. [28]
Vahdat has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award [29] and,in 2003,the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. [30] He became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2011. [31] In 2020,the ACM gave Vahdat the SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution. [32] The National Academy of Engineering elected him as a member in 2023 for his work in creating "datacenter and planet-scale networks that power cloud computer systems." [33]