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VIRGINIA TECH COMPUTER SCIENCE FACULTY EARNS NSF CAREER AWARD |
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 Ali R. Butt, assistant professor at the Computer Science (CS) department at Virginia Tech, has recently been awarded a $400,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his research titled “A Scalable Hierarchical Framework for High-Performance Data Storage.”
“The goal of our research is to address the increasing performance gap between computing power and storage technology, especially for high performance computing (HPC) environments,” said Butt.
Modern scientific applications, such as analyzing information from large-scale distributed sensors, climate monitoring, and forecasting environmental impacts, require powerful computing resources and entail managing an ever-growing amount of data.
“In terms of HPC compute power, we are seeing systems with tens-of-thousands or more processors that reach terabyte speeds, and soon will have the capability of processing a petabyte instructions per second. Unfortunately, this is not matched by a corresponding improvement in the input/output (I/O) systems,” Butt said.
Ali Butt’s CAREER research develops a framework for bridging the said performance gap and supporting efficient and reliable data management for HPC. “The CAREER award will allow me to engage quality graduate students and enable us to innovate, design, develop, and deploy tools and systems for improving the I/O performance of modern HPC setups.”
The target HPC environments present unique research challenges, namely, maintaining I/O performance with increasing storage capacity, low-cost administration of a large number of resources, high-volume long-distance data transfers, and adapting to the varying I/O demands of applications.
Butt’s research addresses these challenges in storage management by employing a Scalable Hierarchical Framework for HPC data storage. The framework provides high-performance reliable storage within HPC cluster sites via hierarchical organization of storage resources, decentralized interactions between sites to support high-speed, high-volume data exchange and strategic data placement, and system-wide I/O optimizations. The overall goal is a data storage framework attuned to the needs of modern HPC applications, which mitigates the underlying performance gap between compute resources and the I/O system.
“Our research adopts a holistic approach where all system components interact to give an efficient data management system for HPC,” Butt said. “The CAREER will help us realize our research goals, and also serve as a symbol of trust from our peers in the research direction we have adopted. These are exciting times.”
Butt received his B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan in 2000 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2006. His research interests lie broadly in experimental computer systems with focus on file and storage systems for high-performance computing. He joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2006.
At Virginia Tech, he leads the Distributed Systems & Storage Laboratory (DSSL). DSSL is interested in exploring the design, development, and evaluation of next-generation storage and file systems. Specifically, the research at DSSL focuses on tailoring these systems for the growing data demands of modern high-end computing applications. To this end, DSSL aims for innovation in systems that range from large-scale distributed setups to specialized kernel-level optimizations.
According to NSF, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
If you’d like to find out more about Ali Butt’s research, please see http://research.cs.vt.edu/dssl/,or contact him directly at
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