Mesos began as a research project in the UC Berkeley RAD Lab by then PhD students Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, and Matei Zaharia, as well as professor Ion Stoica. The students started working together on the project as part of a course on Advanced Topics in Computer Systems taught by David Culler. It was originally named Nexus but due to a conflict with another university's project, was renamed to Mesos.[4]
Mesos was first presented in 2009 (while still named Nexus) by Andy Konwinski at HotCloud '09 in a talk accompanying the first paper published about the project, A Common Substrate for Cluster Computing. Later in 2011 it was presented in a more mature state in a talk by Matei Zaharia at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference about the paper "Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center" by Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Matei Zaharia, Ali Ghodsi, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica.[5]