Ahana announced it is strengthening its commitment to the further development of the Velox Open Source Project, created by Meta, with the dedication of more engineers and significant contributors. Ahana joined Intel and ByteDance as the project's primary contributors when it was open sourced in 2021. 

Velox is a state-of-the-art, C++ database acceleration library. It provides high-performance, reusable, and extensible data processing components, which can be used to accelerate, extend, and enhance data computation engines. It is currently integrated with more than a dozen data systems at Meta, from analytical query engines such as Presto and Spark to stream processing platforms and machine learning libraries such as PyTorch. 

"Velox is poised to be another vibrant open source project created by Meta with significant industry impact. It caught our attention as it enables developers to build highly-efficient data processing engines," said Steven Mih, Cofounder and CEO, Ahana. "It's well understood that at Meta, there are diverse opportunities to improve data processing at scale, and, as a result, trailblazing innovations are developed. As data becomes central to every organization, we see many enterprise data teams facing similar challenges around consistency of diverse data systems, which Velox-based systems could solve. As a primary contributor from the start, we are furthering our commitment to grow a community of developers to collaboratively accelerate the project."

"To our knowledge, Velox is a pioneer effort at unifying execution engines in a centralized open source library. Other than efficiency gains due to its state-of-art components, Velox also provides benefits in terms of increased consistency across big data engines, and by promoting reusability," said Pedro Pedreira, Software Engineer, Meta. "We see Velox as an important step towards a more modular approach to architecting data management systems. Our long-term goal is to position Velox as a de-facto execution engine in the industry, following the path paved by Apache Arrow for columnar memory format. We are excited about the momentum the project is getting, and the engagement and partnership with Ahana's engineers and other open source contributors."

"We're excited to work closely with Ahana, Meta, and Velox community," said Dave Cohen, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel. "While there are other database acceleration libraries, the Velox project is an important, open-source alternative."

Velox Project Significant Contributors from Ahana, include:

Deepak Majeti, Principal Engineer and Velox Contributor. Deepak has been contributing to the Velox project since it was open sourced in 2021. Before joining Ahana, he was a technical lead at Vertica. He has expertise in Big Data and High-Performance computing with a Ph.D. from the Computer Science department at Rice University. Deepak is also an Apache ORC PMC member, Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet committer.

Aditi Pandit, Principal Engineer and Velox Contributor. Aditi has also been contributing to the Velox project since it was open sourced in 2021. Before joining Ahana, she was a senior software engineer at Google on the Ads Data Infrastructure team and prior to that, a software engineer with Aster Data and Informatica Corp.

Ying Su, Principal Engineer and Velox Contributor.  Ying joined Deepak and Aditi as significant contributors to Velox in 2022.  Prior to Ahana, she was a software engineer at Meta and before that, a software engineer at Microsoft. Ying is also a Presto Foundation Technical Steering Committee (TSC) member and project committer.