# Bin Fan

> Bin Fan is Alluxio's VP of Technology and a founding engineer, a distributed-systems researcher whose work has moved from compact key-value structures to the data bottlenecks that idle modern GPU clusters. A Carnegie Mellon computer science Ph.D. and former Google storage engineer, he co-created the cuckoo filter, helped steward Alluxio's open-source community, and now presents the case for placing a fast data layer close to compute across clouds and regions.

- **Role:** VP of Technology and Founding Engineer at Alluxio
- **Organizations:** Alluxio, Google, Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab, Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology of China
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Master's degree, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China
- **Known for:** Co-created the cuckoo filter, a compact probabilistic data structure that supports deletion and was published at ACM CoNEXT 2014., Designed MemC3, which his project description says reduced Memcached memory use by 30% for small key-value pairs and reached 3x throughput on read-heavy workloads., Earned a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. for work on more efficient distributed key-value systems.

## Career timeline

- **2006-2007** — Published research on BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer systems with advisers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- **2007-2013** — Completed doctoral research in Carnegie Mellon's Parallel Data Lab on networks, storage, distributed systems, and more efficient key-value systems.
- **2011-2014** — Co-authored systems work including SILT, MemC3, Blizzard, and Cuckoo Filter: Practically Better Than Bloom.
- **2013** — Earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon; dissertation: Algorithmic Engineering Towards More Efficient Key-Value Systems.
- **2013-2015** — Worked at Google in Mountain View on next-generation storage infrastructure and received a Google technical infrastructure award.
- **2015-present** — Joined Alluxio as a founding engineer, became PMC maintainer of the open-source project, led its open-source initiative, and later became VP of Technology.
- **2017** — Presented with Baidu's Haojun Wang on a production deployment that reported a 30x analytics speedup across hundreds of machines.
- **2024** — Co-authored USENIX ATC research on Alluxio's local cache for petabyte-scale OLAP deployments at Uber and Meta.
- **2025-2026** — Presented Alluxio's data-access architecture for multi-cloud inference, low-latency S3 workloads, and AI infrastructure on OCI.

## Achievements

- Co-created the cuckoo filter, a compact probabilistic data structure that supports deletion and was published at ACM CoNEXT 2014.
- Designed MemC3, which his project description says reduced Memcached memory use by 30% for small key-value pairs and reached 3x throughput on read-heavy workloads.
- Earned a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. for work on more efficient distributed key-value systems.
- Received Google's technical infrastructure award while working on storage infrastructure.
- Served as PMC maintainer for the Alluxio open-source project and helped develop its contributor community.
- Co-authored 2024 USENIX ATC research describing petabyte-scale Alluxio caching in production at Uber and Meta.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Joined Oracle cloud architect Xinghong He for an Alluxio technical session on tiered caching, sub-millisecond latency, and faster data access on OCI.
- **2025-08** — Presented with Fireworks AI engineer Akram Bawayah on multi-cloud inference and a model distribution system reported to exceed 1 TB/s throughput.
- **2025-03** — Discussed decoupled storage and compute for AI infrastructure with Solidigm's Scott Shadley at NVIDIA GTC 2025.
- **2024-10** — Appeared at Open Source Summit + AI_dev Japan and Community Over Code North America with sessions on AI-cloud I/O and large-scale analytics costs.
- **2024-07** — Co-authored a USENIX ATC paper on enterprise-grade petabyte-scale OLAP caching based on deployments at Uber and Meta.

## Links

- Website: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~binfan/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bin-fan/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/binfan
- GitHub: https://github.com/apc999

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/bin-fan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27