CSC News

January 18, 2012

Gu Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Congratulations to Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, assistant professor of computer science at NC State University, on receiving a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  This award, valued at $450,000, supports her proposal titled “Enable Robust Virtualized Hosting Infrastructures via Coordinated Learning, Recovery, and Diagnosis”.
 
These CAREER awards are the most prestigious NSF awards that support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the mission of their organizations.
 
Gu becomes the 21st NSF CAREER Award winner for the Department of Computer Science at NC State (19th currently on faculty), one of the highest concentrations of any department in the nation.
 
The award is effective January 1, 2012 through December 31, 2016.
 
Research Abstract: Large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures have become the fundamental platform for many real world systems such as cloud computing, enterprise data centers, and educational computing lab. However, due to their inherent complexity and sharing nature, hosting infrastructures are prone to various runtime problems such as performance anomalies and software/hardware failures. The overarching objective of this proposal is to systematically explore innovative runtime reliability management techniques for large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures. Our research focuses on handling performance anomalies in distributed systems that are often very difficult to reproduce offline. Our approach combines the power of online learning, knowledge-driven first-response recovery, and in-situ diagnosis to handle unexpected system anomalies more efficiently and effectively. We aim at transforming the runtime system anomaly management from a trial-and-error guessing game into an efficient knowledge-driven self-healing process.
 
Gu received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and 2004, respectively.  She received her B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University, Beijing China in 1999.  Before coming to NC State, Gu was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center from 2004 to 2007.  She received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2006, 2006 and 2007.  She has filed eight patents, and has published more than 50 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.  Gu received an NCSU Faculty Research and Professional Development Award in 2008, and is the recipient of four IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011), and two Google Research Awards (2009 and 2011). 
 
Gu’s research interests are in the areas of systems, with a current focus on autonomic computing, cloud computing, and system integrity.  For more information on Dr. Gu, click here.
 

~coates~ 

Return To News Homepage