Gu receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at N.C. State, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, known as the NSF CAREER Award, is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty in science and engineering.

The award will provide $450,000 over five years to Gu’s research in networking and computer systems. Her project is entitled, “Enable Robust Virtualized Hosting Infrastructures via Coordinated Learning, Recovery, and Diagnosis.”

The project, backed by the NSF’s Division of Computer and Network Systems, aims to find solutions to performance glitches in large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures. Like the ‘cloud,’ virtualized hosting allows multiple domain names to use one server and share resources. Gu will handle functioning issues in distributed systems using online learning, first-response recovery, and diagnosis.

The proposal is designed to find the most efficient and effective ways to fix unexpected system anomalies that are often caused by software bugs or hardware failure. Gu’s research and exploration into runtime reliability management techniques aims to improve dependability and diagnostics in large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures.

The prototype generated in the project will be used in the Virtual Computing Lab at NC State, an educational computing platform for K-12 primary schools, community colleges, and other public universities.

After receiving her BS degree from Peking University in China in 1999, Gu went on to earn her MS degree in 2001 and her PhD degree in 2004 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in computer science. She has filed eight patents and has landed research awards from Google and IBM.