About
Gustavo Alonso is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science (D-INFK) of ETH Zurich and Head of the Institute for Computing Platforms. He has been at ETH since 1995, first as a post-doc, then as Assistant Professor from April 1998, and promoted to Full Professor in October 2001. Within the Systems Group he leads the Information and Communication Systems Research Group.
Education:
- 1989 – Telecommunications Engineering (undergraduate), Madrid Technical University (UPM-ETSIT), Spain
- 1992 – M.S. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
- 1994 – Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
Research Interests:
His work spans databases, distributed systems, cloud-computing architecture, FPGAs, hardware acceleration for data science, parallel and reconfigurable computing. The group investigates how modern heterogeneous hardware—from GPUs to SmartNICs—can be integrated into data-processing systems to achieve orders-of-magnitude performance gains, energy savings, and new functionality such as in-network computation and serverless acceleration.
Scientific Awards & Honors:
- Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
- Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
- Distinguished Alumnus, Department of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara
- Four Test-of-Time / Most Influential Paper Awards across databases, programming languages, cloud computing, and software engineering
Labs & Projects:
He directs the Information and Communication Systems Research Group within the Systems Group (systems.ethz.ch). The lab develops open-source platforms such as Coyote v2 for FPGA abstractions, Shuhai for HBM benchmarking, and MicroRec for micro-second recommendation serving, while collaborating with industry on SmartNICs, serverless analytics, and cloud-scale data analytics.
