Xiao Qin

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Research [Research Interests | Current Projects | Completed Projects | Research Sponsors | Professional Activities | Back to Home]

Grants

1.    PI, NSF CAREER Award, CCF-0845257, “CAREER: Multicore-Based Parallel Disk Systems for Large-Scale Data-Intensive Computing," $400,000 8/2009-7/2014. [NSF Award Abstract]

2.    Lead PI, NSF CNS-Core (Computer Systems Research) grant, CNS-0917137, “CSR:Small:Collaborative Research: FastStor: Data-Mining-Based Multilayer Prefetching for Hybrid Storage Systems," $200,000 (Auburn), Total Award Amount: $499,994, 9/2009-9/2012, [NSF Award Abstract] Auburn Co-PIs: Wei-Shinn Ku and Weikuan Yu. In collaboration with Ziliang Zong and Manuel L. Penaloza at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology ($200,000) and Mais Nijim at the University of  South Mississippi ($99,994)

3.    PI, NSF DUE-CCLI grant, DUE-0837341, “QoSec: A Novel Middleware-Based Approach to Teaching Computer Security Courses," $149,999, 9/2009-8/2012. (Co-PIs: John A. “Drew” Hamilton, Jr., Kai Chang, and Wei-Shinn Ku) [NSF Award Abstract]

4.    PI, NSF CSR (Computer Systems Research) grant, CNS-0757778, “Mathematical Reliability Models for Energy-Efficient Parallel Disk Systems," $150,000 (10/2007-9/2010) [NSF Award Abstract]

5.    PI, NSF CPA (Computing Processes and Artifacts) grant, CCF-0742187, “BUD: A Buffer-Disk Architecture for Energy Conservation in Parallel Disk Systems,” $299,999 (5/2007-4/2010) [NSF Award Abstract]

6.   co-PI, NSF Cyber Trust grant, CNS-0831502, 2008-2011, “SPEAR: Space Encryption based Query Processing for Privacy-Aware Location-based Services," $199,999, 8/2008-7/2011. (PI: Wei-Shinn Ku, co-PIs: John A. “Drew” Hamilton, Jr., Xiao Qin, and Haixun Wang) [NSF Award Abstract]

7.   co-PI, NSF CI-TEAM (Cyberinfrastructure-TEAM) grant, OCI-0753305, 2008-2011, “Collaborative Project: CI-TEAM Implementation Project: A Digital Forensics Cyberinfrastructure Workforce Training Initiative for America's Veterans," $299,636,  8/2008-7/2011. (PI: John A. “Drew” Hamilton, Jr., co-PIs: Kai Chang, Xiao Qin, and Wei-Shinn Ku.) [NSF Award Abstract]

8.   co-PI, NSF SFS (Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service) grant, DUE-0830831, 2008-2010, “Collaborative Research: Building Information Assurance Education Capacity," $174,740, 8/2008-7/2011. (PI: John A. “Drew” Hamilton, Jr., co-PIs: Kai Chang, Xiao Qin, and Wei-Shinn Ku.) [NSF Award Abstract] 

9.   co-PI, NSF REU-Site grant, CNS-0851960, "REU Site for Pervasive and Mobile Computing," $323,127, 5/2009-4/2012. (PI: Saad Biaz, co-PIs: Wei-Shinn Ku and Xiao Qin.)

10.  PI, NSF REU Supplement to CNS-0757778, $12,000, (12/2008-11/2009).

11.  PI, NSF REU Supplement to CCF-0702781, $12,000, (8/2008-07/2009).

12.  PI, Intel Research Grant, “ECS: Scheduling in Energy-Efficient Computing Systems”, $62,000 (9/2005-8/2008)

13.  PI, New Mexico Tech Presidential Research Grant, “Adaptive Quality of Security Control in Storage Systems,” $10,000 (8/2005-7/2006)

14.  PI, New Mexico Tech Start-Up Grant, “SARTS: Security-Aware Real-Time Systems,” $80,000 (8/2004-6/2007)

15.  Altera Corporation Equipment Grant (2/2007-1/2008)

      16.  Xilinx Equipment Grant (8/2006-7/2007)

Research Interests [Back to Top]

Parallel and distributed systems, storage systems, real-time computing, fault tolerance, embedded systems, and performance evaluation.

Current Projects [Back to Top]

MINT: Mathematical Reliability Models for Energy-Efficient Parallel Disk Systems Read more... (10/2007-now)

The MINT project aims at developing mathematical reliability models for fault-tolerant energy-aware disk systems. Reliability models, which are used to estimate reliability, have been important tools in the design and development of fault-tolerant computer systems. In the past decade, a variety of practical and useful reliability models have been constructed for disk systems. However, most of these models were developed for non-energy efficient disk systems, thereby making it difficult to apply the existing reliability models to energy-aware disk systems. Therefore, the overall objective of this project is to address the mathematical underpinnings of modeling reliability of energy-efficient parallel disk systems, where fault tolerance and energy-saving techniques will be seamlessly integrated together to conserve energy without sacrificing reliability in parallel disk systems.

BUD: A Buffer-Disk Architecture for Energy Conservation in Parallel Disk Systems Read more... (5/2007-now)

Parallel disks consisting of multiple disks with high-speed switched interconnect are ideal for data-intensive applications running in high-performance computing systems. Improving the energy efficiency of parallel disks is an intrinsic requirement of next generation high-performance computing systems, because a storage subsystem can represent 27% of the energy consumed in a data center. However, it is a major challenge to conserve energy for parallel disks and energy efficiently coordinate I/Os of hundreds or thousands of concurrent disk devices to meet high-performance and energy-saving requirements. This research investigates novel energy conservation techniques to provide significant energy savings while achieving low-cost and high-performance for parallel disks. In this research project, the investigators take an organized approach to implementing energy-saving techniques for parallel disks, simulating energy-efficient parallel disk systems, and conducting a physical demonstration. This research involves four tasks: (1) design and develop a buffer-disk (BUD) architecture to reduce energy dissipation in parallel disk systems; (2) develop innovative energy-saving techniques, including an energy-related reliability model, energy-aware data partitioning, disk request processing, data movement, data placement, prefetching strategies, and power management for buffer disks; (3) implement a simulation toolkit (BUDSIM) used to develop a variety of energy-saving techniques and their integration in the BUD architecture; and (4) validate the BUD architecture along with our innovative energy-conservation techniques using real data-intensive applications running on high-performance clusters. This research can benefit society by developing economically attractive and environmentally friendly parallel disk systems, which are able to lower electricity bills and reduce emissions of air pollutants. Furthermore, the BUD architecture and the energy-conservation techniques can be transferable to embedded disk systems, where power constraints are more severe than conventional disk systems.

ECS: Energy-Efficient Computing Systems Read more… (9/2005-now)

With the advances of computing technology, the demand on computing systems for high performance and low energy consumption exponentially increases. Next-generation computing systems require innovative energy-efficient scheduling techniques for resource management. In this project, new job and packets scheduling algorithms are designed and implemented for embedded systems, cluster computing platforms, and wireless networks. The algorithms are aimed at achieving the best tradeoffs between energy conservation and high performance for energy-efficient computing systems. The algorithms are evaluated through extensive experiments based on both synthetic benchmark/traces and real-world applications.

SARTS: Security-Aware Real-Time Systems Read more… (9/2004-now)

Improving quality of security is increasingly becoming an important issue in the design of real-time systems, which are indispensable for conducting business in government, industry, and academic organizations. This project addresses the issue of maximizing quality of security for real-time systems. We aim at developing and validating new mechanisms and schemes for security-aware real-time systems, including dynamic/static scheduling algorithms, security overhead modeling, security level controllers, and security-aware storage resources. These new schemes are expected to deliver high quality of security while meeting timing constraints of real-time systems. The novelty of the research comes not only from the security-aware scheduling itself, but also from an improved methodology for designing and evaluating security-aware scheduling algorithms that integrate quality of security, real-time, and task scheduling into networked systems. Once the proposed mechanism is adopted, our security-aware scheduling algorithms will be included within existing cyber security tools and services.

Completed Projects [Back to Top] 

Dynamic Load Balancing for I/O-Intensive Applications on Clusters Read more… (2002-2006)

Over the last ten years, clusters have become the fastest growing platforms in high-performance computing. Due to the rapidly widening performance gap between processors and disks in modern cluster systems, storage systems tend to become a performance bottleneck, which induces much more pronounced performance degradation for I/O-intensive applications such as long running simulations, remote-sensing database systems, and biological sequence analysis. To alleviate the I/O bottleneck, our research investigates load-balancing policies that are capable of achieving the high utilization of disks in addition to those of CPU and memory resources.

Real-time Scheduling in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems Read more… (1998-2001)

Distributed systems are increasingly being applied for critical real-time applications, in which each task must be guaranteed a priori to meet its timing constraint. Therefore, efficient scheduling algorithms and schedulability analysis are needed. Many real-time scheduling algorithms, in which schedulability is a main objective function to be maximized, can be found in the literature. However, most of these real-time scheduling algorithms have an assumption that no error occurs in real-time systems. In order to make real-time scheduling algorithms more practical, reliability in addition to task precedence constraints need to be taken into account. This research includes not only developing real-time and fault-tolerant scheduling algorithms but also exploring various options for designing real-time scheduling algorithms that strive to improve the reliability of heterogeneous systems.

Fault-Tolerant Support for Real-Time Collaborative Editing Systems Read more… (1999-2000)

Groupware systems allow physically dispersed teams to collaborate over common tasks over distance and/or time. In a real-time groupware system, all users are required to be present at their respective sites at the same time, whereas a non real-time groupware system allows users to work on common tasks at different times. Real-time collaborative editing systems, that enable groups of geographically distributed users to simultaneously view and edit shared document, make the groupware applications more practical. In real-time collaborative editing systems, good responsiveness, supporting unconstrained collaboration and tolerant failed processes are main issues. Hence, if a real-time collaborative editor is to be effectively used over the Internet, the system should tolerant the client and link failures, for the quality of the Internet are unpredictable. In this research we have developed a novel and efficient approach to supporting crash recovery in real-time collaborative editing systems. 

Refad: Real-time and  Fault-tolerant Distributed Systems Read more… (1996-1999)

In real-time and distributed systems, tasks must be guaranteed a priori to meet its timing constraint. Mission critical real-time tasks must tolerate faults. In other words, mission critical tasks must be completed before their deadlines even the real-time system encounter temporary and permanent faults. Scheduling multiple copies of a task on different processors is a promising approach to support fault-tolerance. If the primary copy of a task cannot be completed due to a fault, its backup copy executes and complete task before its deadline. We propose a series of new algorithms for fault-tolerant scheduling on a real-time distributed system. The algorithms guarantee the completion of a scheduled task before its deadline in the presence of a processor's permanent failures.

Research Sponsors [Back to Top]

We thank the following agencies for sponsoring our research: 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense" With an annual budget of about $5.91 billion, NSF is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities. Visit Website

Auburn University is a comprehensive land-grant and research institution blending arts and applied sciences. Auburn University offers degrees in 13 schools and colleges at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. Auburn University is not only known for its great education, its also has notability for its impact on the state of Alabama. A recent study determined AU had nearly $4 billion economic impact on the state of Alabama, including a $1.5 billion impact on the economy and a $2.4 billion impact in "human capital." Visit Website

Intel Corporation is the world's largest chip maker also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking, and communications products. Visit Website

Altera Corporation is the pioneer of programmable logic solutions, enabling system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate, and win in their markets. Visit Website

Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. The company leads the Programmable Logic Device(PLD) market - one of the fastest growing segments of the semiconductor industry. Visit Website

Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of 28 Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories across the country, and is the largest institution and largest employer in Northern New Mexico. The laboratory’s annual budget is approximately $1.2 billion. Visit Website

The Petroleum Recovery Research Center (PRRC) of New Mexico Tech is regarded both nationally and internationally as one of the nation's leading petroleum research centers. PRRC was established by the New Mexico State Legislature in 1977 to conduct both basic and applied research designed to improve recovery of petroleum and natural gas. Visit Website

New Mexico Tech is an undergraduate and graduate university specializing in science and engineering education and research. Tech divisions and departments include world-class research programs providing unique student opportunities. Visit Website

Professional Activities [Back to Top]

Technical Committees

Editorships

  • Associated Guest Editor for a special issue on Reliability and Autonomic Management, the Journal of Computer Science, 2005.
  • Editor: Collaborative Computing, IEEE Distributed Systems, (2000 – 2001).

Reviewer

  • NSF Panel Reviewer, Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2007.
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
  • IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
  • IEEE Transactions on Communications
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
  • Real-Time Systems
  • Future Generation Computer Systems Journal
  • IEEE Communication Letters
  • Journal of Cluster Computing
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Software: Practice and Experience
  • The Computer Journal
  • IEEE Internet Computing
  • ICPP’07, Cluster’07, IPCCC’07, ICPP’06, IPCCC’06, IPCCC’05, IPDPS’04, HiPC’03, ICCNMC’01, ICA3PP’00, and HCW’00.

Membership

  • Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Senior Member (2009-Present)
  • Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Member (2004-2009)
  • Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Student Member (1999-2004)
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Member (2008-Present)

Updated on 08/21/2009

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