Yanpei Chen



I work on Product Analytics at Splunk.


yanpeichen [at] gmail [dot] com.

@yanpeichen

Last updated November 2016.

Professional activities

I recently joined Splunk working on Product Analytics. This page will be updated soon with more information.

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.

Recent work

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, my whole family is in the United States, and I am technically an Australian. I hold interests unique to each country - I do Chinese caligraphy, I love college football (Go Bears!!!), and I still itch to play cricket. I went to an all-guys public high school in Australia, and apparently I still owe the teachers there some homework and beer and lost bets. I had a wonderful time as both undergrad and grad student at UC Berkeley. I'm working now, but I believe one should always be a student and constantly learning. My parents are chemists/chemical engineers, and taught me how not to have fun with chemicals. They live and work in New York. I used to play computer games a lot (most recently Civilization 4, Rome Total War, and Starcraft 2), I once was addicted to Friends, I'm reading the Game of Throne series and plan to re-read 100 Years of Solitude (didn't fully "get it" the first time but found it awesome), and I love Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino movies. I play tennis/badminton/table-tennis, I've made a home-recorded album for classical guitar and am halfway recording a second one, I hike sporadically, I've stopped doing archery regularly (not enough physical exertion), and I've lost $8 playing chess against homeless guys. Recently I've taken up fencing - initially did foil, now transitioned to epee (French grip, old school, I know). I'm currently focused on trying to lose more stylishly in fencing, but alway looking for the next hobby too. I hardly ever refuse to eat chocolate.

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