Gustavo Alonso

Tel.:     +41-(0)44-632 7306
Fax:     +41-(0)44-632 1425
E-mail: alonso@ (add ".ethz.ch")

I am a professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in Switzerland where I work as part of the Systems Group (Institute for Computing Platforms). I am also the director of the ETH-AMD Heterogeneous Accelerated Compute Cluster (HACC).

I studied Telecommunications -electrical engineering- at the Madrid Technical University (ETSIT, Politecnica de Madrid). As a Fulbright scholar, I completed an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. After graduating from UCSB, I worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining ETH Zurich. I am a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE, a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC Santa Barbara, and I have received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS (EuroSys).

My research interests encompass almost all aspects of systems, from design to run time. I work in distributed systems, databases, cloud computing, and hardware acceleration of data science. My recent research is related to multi-core architectures, large clusters, FPGAs, and big data, mainly working on adapting traditional system software (OS, databases, networking) to modern hardware platforms.

Some of the awards received for our research include Best Paper Awards (ICDCS'09, FCCM'13, VLDB Industrial Track'22, DAMON'23, VLDB'25) and Test-of-Time Best Paper Awards (VLDB 2010, AOSD 2012, Middleware 2017, Middleware'19). I have served as chair or vice-chair for conferences in several areas (Middleware'04, VLDB'06, Business Process Management'07, ICDE'08, VLDB Experiments and Analysis Track'12, ICDCS'14, EDBT'15, VLDB Industry Track'16, EuroSys'17, ICDE Industry Track'18, and CIDR'24,25,26).

Recent keynotes include those at SIGMOD 2026, ICDE 2024, and CIDR 2023,

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