Ion Stoica

Career

Ion Stoica earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, where Stoica's graduate projects included Dynamic Packet State and Core-Stateless Fair Queueing. Stoica is now a professor in UC Berkeley's EECS department, holding the Xu Bao Chancellor Chair and directing the Sky Computing Lab.⁶¹

Alongside teaching and research, Stoica co-founded three companies: Conviva in 2006, Databricks in 2013 and Anyscale in 2019. Stoica serves as Executive Chairman of both Databricks and Anyscale, and is listed among the advisors of LMSYS.²¹⁵

Research

Stoica's homepage describes research at the intersection of AI and systems, cloud computing and distributed systems, with an interest in both theoretical foundations and practical, deployable implementations. Earlier projects listed there include the Chord peer-to-peer lookup protocol, the Internet Indirection Infrastructure, Apache Mesos, Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), Succinct, Clipper and Alpa.¹

Current projects named on the homepage are Chatbot Arena, vLLM, SkyPilot, Ray and Apache Spark. Stoica is a co-author of the 2017 paper introducing Ray, the 2023 PagedAttention paper behind vLLM, and the 2024 paper describing Chatbot Arena as an open platform for evaluating language models by human preference.¹³⁴⁷

Teaching and students

At Berkeley, Stoica has taught operating systems (CS 162), networking (EE 122, CS 268 and CS 168) and graduate systems courses (CS 262a and CS 294). The homepage lists the PhD students and postdocs Stoica has advised; the entries for past students include faculty posts and co-founded companies.¹⁶

Work and contributions

• Ray Open-source code

  Co-author of "Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications" (2017); Stoica's homepage lists Ray as a current project. The ray-project/ray repository is Apache-2.0 licensed.³¹⁸

• vLLM Open-source code

  Co-author of "Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention" (2023), the vLLM paper; Stoica's homepage lists vLLM as a current project. The vllm-project/vllm repository is Apache-2.0 licensed.⁴¹⁹

• Chatbot Arena Published research

  Co-author of "Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference" (2024); Stoica's homepage lists Chatbot Arena as a current project for human preference evaluation of large language models.⁷¹

Timeline

1. 2000Completed a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.⁶
2. 2006Co-founded the company Conviva.²¹
3. 2013Co-founded Databricks, where Stoica is now Executive Chairman.²¹
4. Dec 16, 2017Co-authored the paper introducing Ray, a distributed framework for emerging AI applications.³
5. 2019Co-founded Anyscale, where Stoica is now Executive Chairman.²¹
6. Sep 12, 2023Co-authored the PagedAttention paper on memory management for LLM serving, the basis of vLLM.⁴
7. Mar 7, 2024Co-authored the Chatbot Arena paper on evaluating LLMs by human preference.⁷

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Co-founder (2006), Conviva¹²

Honors and recognition

• Member, National Academy of Engineering · National Academy of Engineering, 2024⁶¹⁰
• IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award · IEEE, 2023⁶
• Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy · Romanian Academy, 2022⁶
• ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award · ACM SIGOPS, 2019⁶
• ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award · ACM SIGOPS, 2015⁶
• ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery, 2012⁶
• ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award · ACM SIGCOMM, 2011⁶
• IEEE ComSoc William R. Bennett Prize · IEEE Communications Society, 2004⁶
• Sloan Research Fellowship · Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 2003⁶
• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) · U.S. National Science Foundation, 2002⁶
• ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award · Association for Computing Machinery, 2001⁶

Where they work

• UC Berkeley 27 people in the wiki
• Databricks 11 people in the wiki
• Anyscale 1 person in the wiki
• LMSYS 3 people in the wiki

Related people

• Hao ZhangAlso at UC Berkeley
• David PattersonAlso at UC Berkeley
• Joseph E. GonzalezAlso at UC Berkeley
• Yangqing JiaAlso at UC Berkeley
• Collin BurnsAlso at UC Berkeley
• Zhuohan LiInference and serving · Training systems
• Robert ShawInference and serving · Training systems
• Peter SalankiTraining systems · Inference and serving
• Kunle OlukotunTraining systems · Inference and serving
• Daniel HanTraining systems · Inference and serving