NSF CAREER Award for Anshul Gandhi

Funding propels cloud computing research

The National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the leading government research agencies in the American science realm, is once again demonstrating its support to computer science researchers at Stony Brook University through its Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER).

Computer science professor Anshul Gandhi has been named the latest winner of an NSF CAREER Award for his project, Enabling Predictable Performance in Cloud Computing.

Gandhi's CAREER research takes aim at unpredictable performance in cloud environments. Cloud computing has quickly emerged as a key service for all users, offering benefits such as low cost, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go options. The proposed work, which involves theoretical and systems research seeks to enable low resource prices, along with providing ways to consolidate multiple tenants onto a single server without impacting performance.

“The NSF CAREER award is among the most prestigious federal grants given out to early career researchers,” Gandhi said. “I am thrilled to receive this award! Unlike other awards, the NSF CAREER grant also focuses on a large educational plan component, thus directly enhancing my work with students and validating my curriculum development plans.”

Besides the research itself, Gandhi will be working to create interdisciplinary courses and lectures on performance modeling to educate Stony Brook students, along with high school students on Long Island.

With $400,000 in funding from NSF, the project will develop novel performance models to estimate resource contention in opaque cloud deployments. These models will then be leveraged to develop solutions for cloud tenants that dynamically track and mitigate performance variation, thus enabling predictable performance in clouds.

“Gandhi joins a select group of 15 computer science researchers at Stony Brook who are CAREER awardees. His work on cloud computing is set to make cloud computing more resource efficient benefiting cloud users and service providers alike. This is representative of ongoing research in the department that has a direct and immediate impact on the real world,” said Samir Das, chair and professor of computer science.

About the Researcher:

Gandhi earned his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. His 2013 thesis was entitled, Dynamic Server Provisioning for Data Center Power Management, and won the 2013 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award. After graduating, he spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Gandhi's research aims to leverage mathematical tools to address challenges in computer systems. At Stony Brook, Gandhi leads the PACE Lab and currently advises six PhD students and 14 MS students.

This is Gandhi's sixth NSF funding award since joining the Department of Computer Science in 2014, which is part of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Gandhi has also received an IBM Faculty Award and a Google Faculty Research Award for his research.

- Joseph Wolkin