Haoyuan Li

Alluxio, originally known as Tachyon, began as Li’s PhD research at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry’s AMPLab, where it addressed data sharing within the Apache Spark ecosystem.⁠[1]

On March 20, 2017, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released “a16z Podcast: The Storage Renaissance.” Li, as founder and CEO of Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), joined Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine and Taneja Group storage analyst Mike Matchett in a conversation hosted by Sonal Chokshi. Arguing that storage matters more as computing becomes distributed — “Without storage, we wouldn’t have databases; without databases, we wouldn’t have big data” — the episode discussed what storage becoming “faster, cheaper, and more in-memory” means for vendors, IT departments and companies that compete on data.⁠[2]

The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019, under the title “a16z Podcast | The Storage Renaissance.”⁠[3]

On May 7, 2018, the University of California, Berkeley’s EECS Department published Li’s PhD dissertation, “Alluxio: A Virtual Distributed File System” (technical report UCB/EECS-2018-29), advised by Scott Shenker and Ion StoicaIon StoicaIon Stoica is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Sky Computing Lab. He co-founded Conviva, Databricks, Anyscale and the AI model evaluation platform LMArena.Open the full entry. It proposes a virtual distributed file system (VDFS) layer between the compute and storage layers that presents disparate data stores as a single file system, with a memory-centric design giving applications memory-speed I/O; it also examines using lineage to improve write performance and introduces DFS-Perf, a framework for benchmarking distributed file systems.⁠[4]

The a16z podcast episode “a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software” was uploaded to the a16z YouTube channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[5]

Li is founder, chairman and CEO of Alluxio, which is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alluxio’s website lists its investors as including Andreessen Horowitz, Hillhouse, Seven Seas and Volcanic Ventures, along with individual investors Sujal Patel, Tony ZhaoTony ZhaoTony Zhao (Tony Z. Zhao) is a robotics researcher and entrepreneur, the co-founder and chief executive of the home-robotics company Sunday Robotics. As a Stanford University computer science Ph.D. student he was first author of the work introducing the low-cost bimanual teleoperation hardware ALOHA and the imitation-learning algorithm ACT; he dropped out of the program in 2024.Open the full entry and Mark Leslie.⁠[1]

Alluxio: Official website: https://www.alluxio.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]