Stephen Brobst (born September 21, 1962) is an American technology executive.
Brobst was born September 21, 1962, at the hospital on Stanford University campus where both of his parents did their undergraduate studies. In his childhood years he participated in chess tournaments sponsored by the United States Chess Federation (USCF) and in league competitions between high schools in Silicon Valley. He was president of his high school chess club. [1] He graduated as valedictorian from Milpitas High School in 1980.
For his undergraduate work, he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley where he graduated in just three years and was bestowed the Bechtel Engineering Award as the highest honor for a graduating senior in the college of engineering for academic excellence and leadership. [2] [3]
Brobst performed master's and PhD research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where his dissertation work focused on load balancing and resource allocation for massively parallel computing architectures. [4] He also holds an MBA with joint course and thesis work at the Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. At MIT he was bestowed the William Stewart Award for contributions to student life during his nearly ten years as a graduate resident and tutor at the Baker House undergraduate dormitory. [3]
After working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM Research Division in San Jose, and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Brobst founded multiple start-up companies focused on data management products and services. He founded Strategic Technologies & Systems (STS) in 1983 while he was a graduate student at MIT. STS was acquired by NCR Corporation in 1999. From 1993 through 2000 he was co-founder and chief technology officer at Tanning Technology Corporation, a services firm focusing primarily on the implementation of Oracle databases for transaction processing. [5] Tanning executed an initial public offering in 1999 on NASDAQ and was later acquired by Platinum Technologies. He co-founded NexTek Software in 1994, a firm that created a software product for workload management for relational database management systems, as a spinoff from Tanning Technology Corporation. IBM acquired technology from NexTek in 1998 which provided the software foundation for early versions of the DB2 Query Patroller. [6] Brobst was involved in the creation of eHealthDirect, a software start-up for automated claims adjudication using rule-based systems for the health care industry, between 1999 and 2002. eHealthDirect (later renamed to DeNovis) was acquired by HealthEdge in 2003. [1]
Simultaneous with the acquisition of Strategic Technologies & Systems in 1999, NCR Corporation created a separate division for the Teradata relational database management system. Brobst was appointed as chief technology officer for the newly formed Teradata Division and continued to serve in this capacity until January of 2024. [1] Brobst was part of the management team that spun Teradata off as a separate company from NCR Corporation to go public on the New York Stock Exchange on October 1, 2007. [1]
Brobst joined Ab Initio Software as chief technology officer in January of 2024. He had previously worked with the co-founders of Ab Initio Software in the early 1990s while consulting on the implementation of Oracle Parallel Query for the CM-5 at Thinking Machines Corporation, an MIT spinoff from CSAIL and early leader in massively parallel processing architectures focused on AI applications. [7] He and the systems integration and consulting company that he founded, Strategic Technologies & Systems, had worked on many of the early deployments of the Ab Initio Co>Operating System prior to his company being acquired by NCR Corporation in 1999.
During Barack Obama's first term Brobst was appointed to the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in the working group on Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD). As part of this work, he co-authored a report, “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology”, delivered to Obama and the United States Congress in December 2010. [8] This report recommended that all federal agencies should have a Big Data strategy and initiated government investment in this area. [9]
Brobst served as an advisor to the National Academy of Sciences in the area of IT workforce development in 1998 and 1999. [1]
Brobst lectured at Boston University in the computer science department between 1984 and 1992 while working toward his PhD at MIT. He taught undergraduate courses in operating system design, data structures and algorithms. He taught graduate courses in advanced database design as well as parallel computer architecture. Brobst has taught at The Data Warehousing Institute (later renamed Transforming Data With Intelligence) since 1996 and is a TDWI Fellow. [4]
In 2001 Brobst worked with a team of academics in Pakistan to develop a course curriculum for data warehouse design and AI/ML deployment. [1] He participates in the Girls Who Code initiative, teaching computer science concepts to high school girls.
In 2014 Brobst was ranked by Advisory Cloud as the fourth best CTO in the United States behind the CTOs of Amazon, Intel, and Tesla. [10] He is an elected member of the Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Pi engineering honor societies. He is also a nominated member of the New York Academy of Sciences. [1]
Brobst co-authored the chapter on big data for the Handbook of Computer Science (published by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014). [11] He also co-authored a report, “Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology”, delivered to President Barack Obama and the United States Congress in December 2010. [8] In addition, he co-authored “Building a Data Warehouse for Decision Support” (published by Prentice Hall PTR in both English and Polish in 1997 and 1999, respectively). [12] [13]
Brobst authored journal and conference papers in the fields of data management and parallel computing environments. He was a contributing editor for Intelligent Enterprise Magazine and published technical articles in The International Journal of High-Speed Computing, Communications of the ACM, The Journal of Data Warehousing, Enterprise Systems Journal, DM Review, Database Programming and Design, DBMS Tools & Techniques, DB2 Magazine, Oracle Magazine, Teradata Magazine, and many others. [1]
Brobst holds patents in the area of advanced data management and machine learning primarily in areas of workload management for database systems, advanced algorithms for cost-based optimization and SQL query re-writes, and health care analytics. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
NCR Voyix Corporation, previously known as NCR Corporation and National Cash Register, is an American software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and electronic products. It manufactured self-service kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automated teller machines, check processing systems, and barcode scanners.
Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech and Citibank's advanced technology group.
William Daniel Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist. He is a (retired) distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus at LSU. He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.
Vinod Dham is an Indian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is known as the 'Father of the Pentium Chip' for his contribution to the development of Intel's Pentium micro-processor. He is also a mentor and advisor, and sits on the boards of companies, including startups funded through his India-based fund Indo-US Venture Partners, where he is the founding managing director.
The DBC/1012 Data Base Computer was a database machine introduced by Teradata Corporation in 1984, as a back-end data base management system for mainframe computers. The DBC/1012 harnessed multiple Intel microprocessors, each with its own dedicated disk drive, by interconnecting them with the Ynet switching network in a massively parallel processing system. The DBC/1012 was designed to manage databases up to one terabyte in size; "1012" in the name refers to "10 to the power of 12".
M. Dale Skeen is an American computer scientist. He specializes in designing and implementing large-scale computing systems, distributed computing and database management systems.
Harry L. "Nick" Tredennick was an American manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and author who was involved in the development for Motorola's MC68000 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. He held BSEE and MSEE degrees from Texas Tech University, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Tredennick was named a Fellow of the IEEE; the citation reads "For the design and implementation of the execution unit and controller of the MC68000 workstation microprocessor".
In computing, the term data warehouse appliance (DWA) was coined by Foster Hinshaw for a computer architecture for data warehouses (DW) specifically marketed for big data analysis and discovery that is simple to use and has a high performance for the workload. A DWA includes an integrated set of servers, storage, operating systems, and databases.
Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquired by EMC Corporation in July 2010.
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."
Vertica is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by the database researcher Michael Stonebraker with Andrew Palmer as the founding CEO. Ralph Breslauer and Christopher P. Lynch served as CEOs later on.
Chandrasekaran Mohan is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He was born on 3 August 1955 in Tamil Nadu, India. After growing up there and finishing his undergraduate studies in Chennai, he moved to the United States in 1977 for graduate studies, naturalizing in 2007. In June 2020, he retired from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center after working at IBM Research for 38.5 years. Currently, he is a visiting professor at China's Tsinghua University. He is also an Honorary Advisor at the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) in Chennai and an advisor at the Kerala Blockchain Academy in Kerala.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computing:
Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of threads.
Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, and data and information processing, and storage. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware, software, and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system. IT systems play a vital role in facilitating efficient data management, enhancing communication networks, and supporting organizational processes across various industries. Successful IT projects require meticulous planning, seamless integration, and ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with organizational objectives.
Presto is a distributed query engine for big data using the SQL query language. Its architecture allows users to query data sources such as Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, AWS S3, Alluxio, MySQL, MongoDB and Teradata, and allows use of multiple data sources within a query. Presto is community-driven open-source software released under the Apache License.
Michael (Mike) Papazoglou is a Greek/Australian emeritus professor, computer science researcher and author known for his contributions to 'Service-Oriented Computing'. His main research interests include Distributed computing, Database#Database management system, Big data, Service, Domain-specific language and Cloud computing. In more recent years he shifted his focus to pursuing Emerging technologies, Industrial engineering, Smart Applications and Smart Technology Solutions for Healthcare and Manufacturing.