The National Science Foundation has honored Assistant Professor of Computer Science Xiao Qin with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The prize exists to aid young educators involved in international research within the context of the mission of their institution.
"We received the award roughly two weeks ago," Qin said. "It will be used mainly to improve the performance of large-scale data storage programs and data-intensive computing applications that use techniques such as data mining."
Qin has been at Auburn since 2007. He has his Ph. D. in computer science from the University of Nebraska and has research interests in such areas as fault tolerance, performance evaluation and storage systems.
The award is for $400,000, while the project is titled, "Multicore-Based Parallel Disk Systems for Large-Scale Data-Intensive Computing." This research will ideally create the first parallel disk system in which large parts of data and input/output processing are offloaded to multicore processors that are embedded in disk drives.
"We are so pleased to have Xiao's accomplishments recognized with this important CAREER award," said Kai Chang, alumni professor and chair of computer and software engineering.
Qin's award will go toward the connection of multicore computing and parallel disk systems by addressing issues behind multicore computing, data processing and performance analysis. A toolkit will be used to design and analyze the hardware and software components for those systems.
"This is the third award that has been founded," Qin said. ""I'm the P.I. on the project and I have two other co-P.I.s, two other collaborators. One is at the University of South Carolina and another is at the University of Southern Mississippi."
Qin received the second of those awards during the summer for his program titled "QoSec: A Novel Middleware-based Approach to Teaching Computer Security Courses." This was an award from the NSF for $149,000, to be used to develop a program to help students learn the rapid development of critical security software and is the first educational material of its kind designed to teach real-world computing system security to undergraduates.
Another way that Qin will utilize the CAREER award, however, will be in establishing a storage systems laboratory to design real-world data-intensive systems. He will also work to create courses on multicore programming, storage systems and data-intensive computing.
An unofficial, yet important by-product of these grants will be that Qin can further bring minorities to Auburn.
"Qin will utilize our department's infrastructure as a channel to recruit underrepresented minority and female students," Chang said. "He is motivating and retaining minority students to conduct research in the area of storage systems and energy conservation technology."
Do you like this story? The Plainsman doesn't accept money from tuition or student fees, and we don't charge a subscription fee. But you can donate to support The Plainsman.
