Yanpei Chen



Senior Director, Strategic Insights at Splunk.


yanpeichen [at] gmail [dot] com.

LinkedIn

Last updated November 2024.

I run the Products Strategic Insights function at Splunk. I own the vision on using products data to accelerate Splunk's business. My team has purview over portfolio-wide insights and actions in Splunk's Products and Technology organization, as well as Sales, Customer Success, Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Finance, and Legal. My work covers aligned perspectives across 10+ Splunk products and influences 40%+ of Splunk's overall annual recurring revenue.

Past activities

I was previously a member of the Performance Team at Cloudera. My work involved both internal and competitive performance analysis and optimization. I specialized in performance across multiple components of our big data platform, including Hadoop MapReduce, Impala, HBase, Search, and Hive - someone had to make sure the entire Hadoop ecosystem runs fast together.

I'm a lead author to Statistical Workload Injector for MapReduce (SWIM), an open source tool that allows someone to synthesize and replay MapReduce production workloads. SWIM has become a standard MapReduce performance measurement tool used to certify many Cloudera partners. You can learn more about SWIM in our MASCOTS 2011 and VLDB 2012 papers.

I contributed to the first generation big data industry standard benchmarks within the Transactional Processing Council (TPC) - TPC-DS 2.0, TPCx-BigBench, TPCx-HS. I also serve as program committee member and reviewer to various conferences, publications, and NSF funding panels.

I hold a computer science PhD with MBA minor from UC Berkeley. My dissertation is Workload-Driven Design and Evaluation of Large Scale Data Centric Systems. I worked with Professor Randy Katz at the AMP Lab. My dissertation committee also included Professors Vern Paxson and Ray Larson.

Publications

Non-technical interests

I am interested in how technology affects society at large. I believe we computer scientists should participate in relevant discussions and contribute our perspectives.

Half-presentable work from the past:

  • Gender Balance in UC Berkeley EECS. Y. Chen & J. Nam. 2007.

    Self-started research project. Results released in Spring 2007 to the Chair of EECS and the Diversity Director of the Department. Met with UC Berkeley Chancellor & the Assoc. Vice Provost for Faculty Equity to discuss results. Report forwarded to the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, as well as other entities on campus.

Personal stuff

I was born in China and holds Australian-US citizenship. I hold interests unique to each country - I do Chinese caligraphy, I love college football (Go Bears!!!), and I still miss playing cricket. I went to an all-boys public high school in Australia, and I hold Computer Science BS, MS, and PhD with MBA Minor degrees from UC Berkeley. I am a happy father of two energetic toddler boys, and I currently spend the majority of my spare time playing with them. When they grow older, I hope to revive my neglected interests and introduce these interests to my sons, including various sports (badminton, table tennis, fencing, archery), classical guitar, chess, hiking, and traveling.

The rest to be filled later ...

Past awards

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow
UC Berkeley Regents and Chancellors Scholar
UC Berkeley Lipson Humanistic Values Scholar
Premier's Awards in Math, Physics, Chemistry (Victoria, Australia)
Australia Student Prize 2001