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Parthasarathy Ranganathan wins technical Emmy
Ranganathan, who is now a vice president and technical fellow at Google, was recognized for his work on the "Design and Deployment of Efficient Hardware Video Accelerators for Cloud."
Parthasarathy Ranganathan / Image- LinkedIn
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has awarded an Emmy to Parthasarathy Ranganathan, an IIT Madras graduate and Silicon-valley based computer scientist.
Ranganathan, who is now a vice president and technical fellow at Google, was recognized for his work on the "Design and Deployment of Efficient Hardware Video Accelerators for Cloud." He will accept the Emmy at the 75th annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony in October.
Ranganathan's recognition stems from his role as a co-founder of the Argos project and chief architect of the specialized chip it created. The Argos video-transcoding chips have significantly increased computer efficiency for video streaming on YouTube, a Google subsidiary.
“Our Argos work on deploying hardware video accelerators at warehouse scale is what we’re being recognized for by the Emmy,” said Ranganathan. “What we developed were customized server chips for video streaming on our subsidiary, YouTube.”
The Argos chips have made video processing 20 to 33 times more efficient compared to previous server configurations. Instead of taking days to process 4K video, it now takes only hours. Since its inception in 2015, the Argos project has been fully deployed across all Google data centers.
“When the pandemic hit in 2020, video usage went up something like 25 percent in watch time across the world in a 30-day period. The fact that we had an accelerator lying around that could stand up to all the demand was pretty useful. That was a memorable moment for us,” he recalled.
The IIT graduate journey began at Rice University, where he earned his Master of Science in computer engineering in 1997 and his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2000. His doctoral thesis, “General-Purpose Architectures for Media Processing and Database Workloads,” was supervised by professors Joseph Cavallaro and Keith Cooper.
After spending 13 years at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Ranganathan joined Google in 2013. His extensive contributions to the field have earned him fellowships at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. Additionally, he has served on the board of directors for OpenCompute and co-authored the textbook “Datacenter as a Computer.” He jointly holds more than 100 patents.
Ranganathan has received numerous accolades, including being named a top 15 “enterprise technology rock star” by Business Insider and one of the top 35 young innovators by MIT Tech Review. In 2008, he received Rice’s Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award.
Reflecting on his Emmy recognition, Ranganathan said, “It’s a great thrill being recognized like this. The technical Emmys are given for industry contributions, so this is shared across Google, Meta, Netint, and so forth. But Google was the first in the industry to deploy video accelerators at scale in the cloud.”
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