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Research Overview

Current Research

My ongoing research projects include:

Energy-Efficient Storage Systems

Processor Fault Tolerance

My research is supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, including CAREER, Cyber Trust, and CRI awards, and research grants from Intel, HP, and Google.

Past Research and Work Experience

I received my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State, where I was a member of the Computer Systems Lab. I received my Bachelor of Engineering degree in CSE from the College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University in India.

My PhD thesis looked at how to manage power and temperature in storage systems. I proposed a new disk drive design, called DRPM, where the disk can rotate at multiple speeds. This allows one to dynamically tradeoff power for performance at a finer granularity than what is possible with just "on/off" states. Disks with multi-RPM capabilities are now commercially available (e.g., Western Digital Caviar GP) and are used to build energy-efficient storage systems (e.g., Nexsan storage servers). I also conducted a detailed roadmap study of disk drives and showed that temperature will be a significant roadblock for continued improvements in disk drive performance and argued that disks should be equipped with dynamic thermal management mechanisms. Such thermal management mechanisms have started appearing in commercial disk drive products.

I have also worked on a variety of other research topics, including: complete machine power simulation, energy-conscious query processing in mobile spatial databases, performance and power modeling of large-scale main-memory systems (at the IBM Austin Research Lab) and lots of interesting things related to transient faults (at the Fault-Aware Computing Technology (FACT) Group, Intel).