Author: Mark

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam recently served on the organizing committee of IEEE Globecom and was a TPC co-chair of the Optical Networks and Systems symposium. Globecom was held December 4-8 in Washington, DC and is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. It consists of 13 symposia and attracts approximately 2,500 attendees, including several researchers from industry. On December 8, Prof. Subramaniam also organized the NSF JUNO PI meeting, held in the SEH. The JUNO program is a joint program between Japanese and US researchers on large-scale communication networks. The PI meeting included project presentations from the PIs of the funded projects, as well as a keynote talk titled “Stormy Clouds,” delivered by Prof. Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of EECS at MIT.

Prof. Tian Lan has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) collaborative grant awarded to GW and Purdue for the project “Rethinking Erasure Codes for Cloud Storage: A Quantitative Framework for Latency, Reliability, and Cost Optimization.” As erasure coding is increasingly adopted by large-scale storage systems such as Microsoft Azure and Facebook, this project aims to develop an analytical framework that quantifies tail latency and reliability of erasure-coded storage through investigation of novel scheduling and repair strategies, mandating rethinking of erasure codes for online storage. GW and Purdue each will receive $250,000 from this grant.

Professors Guru Venkataramani and Milos Doroslovacki have received $450,000 in funding for three years from the highly competitive and prestigious SaTC/STARSS program, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). SRC is a consortium of leading semiconductor companies such as Intel, IBM, and TI. In this project, the PIs will investigate the implications of shared multi-core hardware and their vulnerability to information leakage via covert timing and side channels.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam is the lead PI on a $500,000 NSF collaborative grant awarded to GW and MIT for the project “WDM-based ultra-scale data center networks: architectures and control algorithms.” Conventional data center network architectures use power-hungry electronic switches and struggle to keep up with bandwidth demands as data centers scale in size to hundreds of thousands of servers. This project aims to explore novel alternative architectures for data center networks that are based on several optical switching technologies. The project also involves two key (unfunded) partners, Microsoft—which will share its expertise and data from operating large data centers—and Infinera, a company that designs and manufactures optical components and systems. GW and MIT will each receive $250,000 from the grant.

The School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) celebrated its 10th annual SEAS Student Research & Development Showcase on February 24, 2016. More than 100 SEAS students competed for $32,000 in total prize money.

Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. students Sultan Alamro and Maotong Xu won First Place ($3,000) in the Theoretical Research category at the SEAS 2016 R&D Showcase for their poster titled “CRED: Cloud right-sizing to meet execution deadlines and data locality”.

The aim of their research is to focus on a very promising technique called "cloud right-sizing" for making compute clouds more cost-effective by dynamically adapting the number of active servers to match the target workload. Cloud right-sizing enables significant cost and power savings by auto-tuning the amount of active resources to handle the current workload. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation, and the students work under the supervision of Prof. Subramaniam and Prof. Lan.

For information on the SEAS 2016 R&D Showcase visit SEAS’ website.