Publish Date: 04/03/2013

Associate Professor Ali Butt was named a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow at the Dean's Awards for Excellence ceremony held at The Inn at Virginia Tech on April 2, 2013.  Dean Richard Benson made the following remarks about Dr. Butt's achievements: "Dr. Butt is broadly interested in efficient distributed computer systems for high performance computing. Recently, the National Academy of Engineering invited him to organize a session on cloud computing at its U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. The NAE also invited him to participate in the U.S. – Japan Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2012. An NSF CAREER award recipient, Dr. Butt has established the Distributed Systems and Storage Laboratory. To insure his solutions are deployable in real-world practice, he has collaborations with government facilities such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and with industrial labs such as IBM. His work on developing a simulator for the widely used MapReduce program won a Best Paper Award in 2009 that has led to follow-on publications in 2012. IT practitioners are testing this simulator for designing emerging cloud-computing environments.

"His work on designing a tiered cluster-level distributed cache for handling massive datasets is a pioneering contribution that provides integrated storage management for HPC centers. According to Google Scholar, his publications have been referenced many hundreds of times, further confirming the impact of his research. He is currently advising 8 Ph.D. students, one master’s candidate, and four undergraduate scholars. Overall, he has advised 21 students."