Google employee to talk Sawzall at May 5 presentation on campus

Google's Siddartha Naidu will be on the Western Washington University campus Thursday, May 5, for a presentation on the Sawzall programming language and distributed framework.

Naidu's talk will take place from 4 to 5 p.m. in Communications Facility Room 110.

The main purpose of Sawzall is analyzing massive data sets. It is designed to make a large class of standard metrics easy to compute over complex datasets that are:

• too large to process on a single machine
• too complex to query via an SQL query language.

Naidu's talk will focus on Sawzall tables, which are used to abstract the notion of aggregation, and how appropriate table implementations make a variety of complicated operations simple to perform.

Naidu received his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in particle astrophysics, specializing in the area of particle models related to inflation and their signatures in the microwave background. After graduation, he joined Google in 2005 at their Mountain View, Calif., office. Initially, he worked on the ad-serving team, for which he built and evaluated models for serving advertisements efficiently. Since then he has worked in a number of areas, including print digitization, social networking and most recently in the cloud computing services in the Seattle office. His primary areas of interest are distributed computing and applications.