Eric A A. Brewer

Eric Brewer's work on applying many loosely coupled machines to large-scale data-intensive computing problems laid the foundation for the giant datacenters that today underpin all major information technology services - search, email, social networks, mapping and many others - and also enable cloud computing. He showed how to make such clusters of computers scalable and fault-tolerant in the Berkeley NoW project, and deployed them at scale in the Inktomi search engine. Later he proposed the CAP theorem, which is now fundamental to the design of large-scale systems: out of Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance, you can have two but not all three. His recent work on technology for developing regions has had remarkable success in delivering information systems that are actually used to benefit tens of thousands of people and can be sustained with local resources.