CSC News

Dr. Helen Gu Wins 10-Year Best Paper Award at SoCC ’20

The ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020 (SoCC '20) recently awarded Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu and co-authors, Zhiming Shen (Exotanium, Inc.), Sethuraman Subbiah (Amazon), and John Wilkes (Google), the 10-Year Best Paper Award for their paper “CloudScale: Elastic Resource Scaling for Multi-Tenant Cloud Systems”. This paper focuses on the CloudScale system and how it addresses challenges in prediction-driven elastic resource scaling with solutions including adaptive padding, fast under-estimation error correction, predictive migration, and integration with DVFS. 

CloudScale was part of a larger project created 14 years ago at NC State with the goal of developing a new system management framework that would help operators move toward proactive intelligence system management. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Office (ARO), Google, IBM, and Credit Suisse. 

The 10-Year Best Paper Award was established in 2019 when the Symposium on Cloud Computing turned ten years old. This award “recognizes the paper that has stood the test of time with its technical contribution”. Dr. Gu’s paper stood out as a breakthrough paper on cloud elasticity having over 630 citations, demonstrating its relevance and impact. 

Gu is a professor in the NC State Computer Science Department, and the Founder and CTO of InsightFinder Inc. She has filed nine patents and has published more than 80 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Gu is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, four IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), and two Google Research Awards (2009, 2011), best paper awards from ICDCS 2012, CNSM 2010, and an NCSU Faculty Research and Professional Development Award.  Her research areas include autonomic computing, cloud computing, and accountable distributed systems. 

The SoCC '20 conference took place October 19-21, 2020, and was the eleventh symposium of the established symposia series for researchers, developers, users, and practitioners interested in cloud computing. 

~snyder~