Xiao Qin's Students

Auburn University

[Total: 61 | Current Students: 13 | Student Alumni: 37 | Other Students: 11 ]

Students

Current Students

[ Total: 13 | Doctoral Students: 7 | Master's Students: 4 | Undergraduate Students: 2 ]


Yi Zhou [Ph.D. Student, Fall 2018 Expected]

Dissertation Research: Energy-Efficient Database Operations on Multicore Servers.
Evaluating energy efficiency of database applications running on multicore systems becomes an indispensable and strategic component of building green data centers. We discuss the criteria and challenges of building an energy efficiency benchmark for databases. We construct a benchmark to evaluate the energy consumption of operations on multicore processors.

Shubbhi Taneja [Ph.D. Student, Fall 2018 Expected]

Dissertation Research: Thermal-Efficient Hadoop Clusters.
We develop a thermal model to investigate thermal profiles of Hadoop clusters processing a massive amount of data.

Yangyang Liu [Ph.D. Student, Fall 2017 Expected]

Dissertation Research: Energy-Efficient Benchmarking of Database Systems.
We develop an energy-efficiency benchmark tool for database systems. Our tool will be applied to develop green resource management techniques for large-scale database systems.

Yuanqi Chen [Ph.D. Student, Summer 2016 Expected]

Dissertation Research: Thermal-Aware Resource Provisioning in Data Centers.
We address the issue of dynamic resource provisioning in energy-efficient data centers. Our goal is to develop thermal-friendly dynamic resource provisioning techniques to reduce cooling cost of data centers.

Liang Tang [Ph.D. Candidate, Summer 2015 Expected]

Dissertation Research: A MapReduce Framework for Probabilistic Skylines over Uncertain Data.
We are focusing on how to leverage the MapReduce programming model to process the exact p-skylines on uncertain data in a highly efficient and scalable way.

Ajit Chavan [Ph.D. Candidate, Summer 2015 Expected]

Dissertation Research: Thermal-Aware File Assignment in Cluster Storage Systems.
In this research, we present a thermal-aware file assignment technique called TIGER for reducing cooling cost of storage clusters in data centers. The TIGER scheme aims to lower peak inlet temperatures of storage clusters by dynamic thermal management through file placements. TIGER makes use of cross-interference coefficients to estimate the recirculation of hot air from the outlets to the inlets of data nodes. We evaluate performance of TIGER in terms of both cooling energy conservation and response time of a storage cluster. Our results confirm that TIGER reduces cooling-power requirements for clusters by offering about 10 to 15 percent cooling-energy savings without significantly degrading I/O performance.

Tausif Muzaffar [Ph.D. Candidate, Summer 2015 Expected]

Dissertation Research: An I/O-Aware Thermal Model for Data Centers.
With ever-growing cooling costs of large-scale data centers, thermal management of must be adequately addressed. Thermal models play a critical role in thermal management that helps in reducing cooling costs in data centers. However, existing thermal models for data centers overload I/O activities. To address this issue, we develop an I/O-aware thermal model called iTad for data centers. The iTad model captures the thermal characteristics of servers in a data center, offering a much finer granularity than the existing models. In addition to CPU workloads, iTad incorporates the I/O load in order to accurately estimate the thermal footprint of the servers with I/O-intensive activities. We validate the accuracy of the iTad model using real-world temperature measurements acquired by an infrared thermometer.

Sudha Varanasi [M.Sc. Student, Aug. 2015 Expected]

Research Project: User-Based Recommendation Systems on Hadoop Clusters.

Chetan Prakash Somani [M.Sc. Student, Dec. 2015 Expected]

Research Project: Item-Based Recommendation Systems on Hadoop Clusters.

Anirudh Sivapurapu [M.Sc. Student, Dec. 2015 Expected]

Research Project: Distributed Real-Time Computing on Hadoop Clusters.

Hasitha Athota [M.Sc. Student, Dec. 2015 Expected]

Research Project: Parallel Recommendation Systems on Hadoop Clusters.

James Sentell [Undergraduate Student, May 2015 Expected]

Research Project: Parallel Recommendation Systems.

Justin Lovell [Undergraduate Student, Dec. 2015 Expected]

Research Project: Parallel Recommendation Systems.

 

Student Alumni

[Total: 37 | Doctorates: 15 | Master's Students: 5 | Undergraduate Students: 17| Back to Top]

Doctoral Student Alumni

Xunfei Jiang [Dissertation] (Ph.D., Aug. 2014)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at Earlham College.
Dissertation: Thermal Modeling of Data Storage Systems. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
We address in this study the thermal impact of storage systems. In the first phase of this work, we generate the thermal profile of a storage server containing three hard disks. The profiling results show that disks have comparable thermal impacts as processing and networking elements to overall storage node temperature. We develop a thermal model to estimate the outlet temperature of a storage server based on processor and disk utilizations. The thermal model is validated against data acquired by an infrared thermometer as well as build-in temperature sensors on disks. Next, we apply the thermal model to investigate the thermal impact of workload management on storage systems. Read more...

Yun Tian [Dissertation] (Ph.D., May 2013)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at California State University, Fullerton.
Dissertation: Security and Performance Improvement in Distributed Systems. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
In this project, we develop a fragment allocation scheme called S-FAS to improve security of a distributed system where storage sites have a wide variety of vulnerabilities. In the S-FAS approach, we integrate file fragmentation with the secret sharing technique in a distributed storage system with heterogeneous properties in vulnerability. Storage sites in a distributed system are classified into a variety of different server types base upon vulnerability characteristics. Given a file and a distributed system, S-FAS allocates fragments of the file to as many different types of nodes as possible in the system. Read more...

Ji Zhang [Dissertation] (Ph.D., May 2013)

Employment after Graduation: Member of Technical Staff, VT iDirect, Inc.
Dissertation: Context-Based File Systems and Spatial Query Applications. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
This dissertation presents studies related to I/O techniques in data-intensive computation and advanced solutions of spatial queries. There is a lack of general mechanisms for integrating multiple file system techniques and, therefore, the dissertation first illustrates a framework for Context-Based File Systems (CBFSs), which simplifies the development of context-based file systems and applications. Unlike existing informed-based context-aware systems, the framework provides a unifying informed-based mechanism that abstracts context-specific solutions as views, thereby allowing applications to make view selections according to their behaviors. In the second part of this dissertation, we propose two novel spatial queries, multi-criteria optimal location query and keyword-spatial query. Read more...

Shu Yin [Dissertation] (Ph.D., May 2012)

Current employment: Associate Professor at Hunan University, Hunan, China. Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at Hunan University, Hunan, China.
Dissertation: Reliability Models for Energy-Efficient Disk Systems. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
This project contributes to reliability modeling techniques for fault-tolerant and energy-efficient parallel disk systems by developing a reliability analysis modeling toolkit accompanied with a set of novel mathematical reliability models. The innovative models investigated in this project include disk power consumption models, a reliability model for parallel disk systems with redundancy techniques, a reliability model for repairable and energy-efficient parallel disk systems, a fault recovery model for energy-efficient parallel disk systems. Read more...

Yixian Yang [Dissertation] (Ph.D., May 2012)

Employment after Graduation: Member of Technical Staff, VMWare Inc.
Dissertation: Improve I/O Performance of Hadoop Clusters. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
This project will contribute to reliability modeling techniques for fault-tolerant and energy-efficient parallel disk systems by developing a reliability analysis modeling toolkit accompanied with a set of novel mathematical reliability models. The innovative models investigated in this project include disk power consumption models, a reliability model for parallel disk systems with redundancy techniques, a reliability model for repairable and energy-efficient parallel disk systems, a fault recovery model for energy-efficient parallel disk systems. Read more...

Jiong Xie [Dissertation] (Ph.D., December 2011)

Current employment: Senior Engineer, Inner Mongolia Power (Group) Co.,Ltd., China. Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at Hunan University, Hunan, China.
Dissertation: Improving Performance of Hadoop Clusters. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
This project addresses the problem of how to place data across nodes in a way that each node has a balanced data processing load. Apart from the data placement issue, we also design a prefetching and predictive scheduling mechanism to help Hadoop in loading data from local or remote disks into main memory. Read more...

Maen Al Assaf [Dissertation] (Ph.D., December 2011)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at University of Jordan, Jordan.
Dissertation: Informed Prefetching in Distributed Multi-Level Storage Systems. [Abstract | PDF | PPT ]
We present pipelined prefetching mechanisms that use application-disclosed access patterns to prefetch hinted blocks in multi-level storage systems. The fundamental concept in our approach is to split an informed prefetching process into a set of independent prefetching steps among multiple storage levels (e.g., main memory, solid state disks, and hard disk drives). Read more...

Xiaojun Ruan [Dissertation | Publications] (Ph.D., Summer 2011)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Dissertation: Improving Energy Efficiency and Security in Cluster Computing Systems. [Abstract | PDF]
We proposed a Time Aware Dynamic Voltage Scaling scheduling algorithm to conserve energy cost of processors in parallel computing systems and a design of an energy efficient I/O System with write buffer disks to conserve energy cost of large scale storage systems. In addition to improving energy efficiency of clusters, we implemented a transparent encryption/decryption layer in a popular Message Passing Interface implementation: MPICH2. Read more...

Zhiyang Ding [Dissertation | Publications] (Ph.D., Summer 2011)

Employment after Graduation: Member of Technical Staff, State Development & Investment Corporation, China.
Dissertation: An Active and Hybrid Storage System for Data-intensive Applications. [Abstract | PDF]
We present a new architecture of active storage system, which leverage the computational power of the dedicated processor, and show how it utilizes the multi-core processor and offloads the computation from the host machine. We then solve the challenge of applying the active storage node to cooperate with the other nodes in the cluster environment by design a pipeline-parallel processing pattern and report the effectiveness of the mechanism. In order to evaluate the design, an open-source bioinformatics application is extended based on the pipeline-parallel mechanism. Read more...

Adam Manzanares [Awards: 3 | Publications] (Ph.D., Summer 2010)

Current employment: Research Staff Member at HGST, a Western Digital company Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor, California State University, Chico Employment after Graduation: Postdoctoral Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Dissertation: Energy Efficient Prefetching – From Models to Implementation. [Abstract | PDF]
The goal of this research is to bring down the cost of operating parallel disk systems. A computer hard drive can be in several states, including active, idle, or standby, and these states consume various amounts of energy. The project attempts to prefetch popular data into a small subset of the parallel disks (buffer disks) and allow the other disks in the disk system (data disks) to be placed in the standby state. When the data is moved it may cause the buffer disks to become a bottleneck, so the buffer disks must be carefully managed to prevent unacceptable degradations to response times. Adam's work on energy conservation for high-performance clusters appeared in the proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster'06), Sept. 2006. Read more...

Kiranmai Bellam [Awards: 4 | Publications] (Ph.D., Summer 2009)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Prairie View A&M University.
Dissertation: Improving Energy-Efficiency, Reliability, and Security of Storage Systems and Real-Time Systems [Abstract | PDF]
Fault tolerance, security, and energy issues in modern real-time systems are of critical importance. This work is intended to seamlessly integrate security services and energy conservation techniques for real-time systems while endeavoring to achieving high system reliability. Read more...

Ziliang Zong [Awards: 12 | Publications Total: 24; Journal Papers: 7; Conference Papers: 17] (Ph.D., Summer 2008)

Now: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Texas State University.
Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Dissertation: Energy-Efficient Resource Management for High-Performance Computing Platforms [Abstract | PDF]
Minimizing power dissipation is an important requirement in developing resource management systems for clusters. In this work, we investigate resource allocation solutions that conserve energy in clusters while retaining high performance. Our resource allocation approaches will judiciously allocate resources of a cluster computing system to satisfy performance needs of parallel applications and achieve significant energy savings. Read more...

Mohammed Alghamdi [Awards: 17 | Publications Total: 15; Journal Papers: 3; Conference Papers: 12] (Ph.D., Summer 2008)

Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia.
Dissertation Research: Energy-Efficient and Security-Aware Message Scheduling for Real-Time Wireless Networks.
Reducing energy consumption has become a major goal in designing modern wireless networks. The focus of this study is to investigate the power and real-time issues in wireless networks. The study aims to develop a rich variety of scheduling schemes to reduce energy dissipation while meeting timing constraints of real-time applications in wireless networks. Read more...

Mais Nijim [Awards: 4 | Publications Total: 27; Journal Papers: 12; Conference Papers: 15] (Ph.D., Summer 2007, New Mexico Tech)

Now: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University-Kingsville.
Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern Mississippi.
Dissertation: Adaptive Quality of Security Control in Storage Systems. [Abstract | PDF] The purpose of this study is to address a novel approach to achieving high performance and high quality of security at the same time. We proposed an array of adaptive quality of security control schemes that makes it possible for storage systems to adapt to changing security requirements and workload conditions. Read more...

Tao Xie [Awards: 13 | Publications Total: 33; Journal Papers: 17; Conference Papers: 16] (Ph.D., May 2006, New Mexico Tech)

Now: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University.
Employment after Graduation: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, San Diego State University.
Dissertation: Security-Aware Scheduling for Real-Time Systems. [Abstract | PDF]
An increasing number of real-time systems like aircraft control and medical electronics systems require high quality of security to assure confidentiality, authenticity and integrity of information. This work investigates scheduling approaches to improving security of real-time systems. Read more...


Master's Student Alumni

James Majors (M.S., May 2011)

Employment after Graduation: Software Developer, Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc.
Thesis: Secdoop: A Confidentiality Service for Hadoop Clusters. [Abstract | PDF]
Our goal in this project is to design and implement a fast and secure distributed file system that can provide transparent and end-to-end encryption support to MapReduce applications running on Hadoop clusters.

Jianguo Lu (M.S., May 2011)

Now: Doctoral Student, Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures, Auburn University.
Research Project: MPI-Velvet: A Next Generation Sequence Assembler.
We developed MPI-Velvet – a parallel assembler software tool – using MPICH-2 (a message passing interface implementation). MPI_Velvet can process high coverage data sets and quickly reconstruct the underlying sequences. This project contributes to the bioinformatics research community with a new parallel computing tool.

Gourav Tilve [Publications] (M.S. Dec. 2007, New Mexico Tech)

Thesis: Energy-Aware Data Prefetching in Disk-Based Buffers.
In this study we aim at developing novel data prefetching strategies to conserve energy in large scale storage systems with buffer disks while improving usage of disk-based buffers.

Kiranmai Bellam [Awards: 4 | Publications Total: 15; Journal Papers: 5; Conference Papers: 10] (M.S. Dec. 2006, New Mexico Tech)

Ph.D. Student, Auburn University (Aug. 2007-Aug. 2009). Ph.D. Student, New Mexico Tech (Dec. 2006-July 2007).
Research Project: Fault Tolerance and Security Management in Real-Time Systems.
The purpose of this study is to address a novel approach to achieving strong fault tolerance and high quality of security at the same time. We will seamlessly integrate a variety of fault tolerant techniques with an array of security mechanisms in the context of real-time systems.

Adam Roth [Publications Total: 3; Journal Papers: 2; Conference Papers: 1] (M.S., Dec. 2005, New Mexico Tech)

Employment after Graduation: Member of Technical Staff, BigTribe Corporation
Thesis: Power Aware Disk Scheduling Algorithms for Real-Time Systems. [Abstract | PDF]
This work addresses the crucial issue of energy conservation in real-time storage systems. The thesis presents two energy-aware power management policies, namely, I/O Burstiness for Energy Conservation (IBEC) and Speed-Aware Real-time Disk Scheduling for energy conservation (SARDS), which integrate power management policies into disk scheduling algorithms for I/O-intensive applications. Read more...


B.S. Student Alumni

Chris Muschek [B.S., Dec. 2014]

Research Project: iOS Application Development.

Collin McAtee [B.S., May 2014]

Research Project: Parallel Computing for Light-Field Photography.

Garrett Walden [B.S. May 2013]

Alfred Nelson, Drew Pitchford, and John Barton [B.S. 2012]

Research Project: Programming Projects for Computer Security Courses.
We are implementing new programming projects for computer security courses. The projects developed in this study allow teachers to help students learn the rapid development of critical security software.

Greg Poirier, Alexander Luchs, Riley Spahn, and Kathryn Catlett [Undergraduate Students]

Research Project: Programming Projects for Computer Security Courses.
Our goal in this project is to design and implement a fast and secure distributed file system that can provide transparent and end-to-end encryption support to MapReduce applications running on Hadoop clusters.

Hyongwoo Hur [Undergraduate Student]

Website Design for NSF Funded Projects.
We are design and implementing website for five NSF-sponsored research projects. Find new designed project websites and logos at http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~xqin/research

Tsukasa Ogihara [REU Undergraduate Student]

Research Project: Performance Evaluation of the MIRA Genome Fragment Assembler.
In addition to the Celera Assembler, MIRA is a genome fragment assembler to be evaluated by our group. Our goal is to improve performance of the assembly systems.

Christopher M. Monsanto [REU Student, Summer 2008]

Research Project: Dynamic Power Management for Parallel Disk Systems.
In this research project we design and implement a dynamic power management mechanism to conserve energy in parallel disk systems. The prototype of this mechanism will be integrated into an energy-efficient parallel disk system with buffer disks.

Matthew E. Briggs [Awards: 1 | Publications Conference Papers: 2] (B.S., May 2007, New Mexico Tech)

Senior Research Project: Energy-Efficient Disk Buffer Disks.
The goal of this research is to develop a novel buffer-disk architecture that will provide significant energy savings while achieving low-cost and high-performance for parallel disks. In this project we will take an organized approach to implementing energy-saving techniques for parallel disks and simulating energy-efficient parallel disk systems. Read more...

Tenzin Doleck (B.S., May 2007, New Mexico Tech)

Senior Research Project: Energy-Efficient Storage Systems.
Improving the energy efficiency of storage systems is an intrinsic requirement of next generation large-scale computing systems, because a storage subsystem can represent 27% of the energy consumed in a data center. The goal of this research is to investigate energy conservation techniques that will provide significant energy savings while achieving high-performance for storage systems.

Brian Stinar [Awards: 2 | Publications Conference Papers: 1] (B.S., Dec. 2006, New Mexico Tech)

Now: Graduate Student, University of New Mexico.
Senior Research Project: Energy Consumption Models for High-Performance Clusters.
This study addresses the issue of modeling energy dissipation in computational nodes and network interconnections in high-performance clusters. Brian's work on energy consumption models for clusters appeared in the proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster'06), Sept. 2006. Brian is a winner of the IEEE TCSC's prestigious Student Travel Award. Read more...

Adam Manzanares [Awards: 2 | Publications Conference Papers: 1] (B.S. with Honors, May 2006, New Mexico Tech)

Now: Doctoral Student, Auburn University (2006-Present). Master's Student, University of Colorado at Boulder (2005-2006).

Senior Research Project: Random and Regular Benchmark Task Graphs for Parallel Programs.
In this study we simulated an array of real world parallel applications running on energy-efficient clusters. Adam's work on energy conservation for high-performance clusters appeared in the proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster'06), Sept. 2006. Read more...


Other students who have worked with me

[Total: 11 | Doctoral Students: 8 | Master's Students: 3 | Back to Top]

Joshua Lewis [08/2011 - 07/2012 | Publications Total: 2] (Doctoral Student, Auburn University)

Dissertation Research: Prefetching with Dynamic Cache Buffer Allocations.
To bridge the widening gap between I/O througput and processing power, dependency-based predictive prefetching takes advantage of the abundant CPU power to speculatively pre-load disk blocks based on their temporal associativity. Typically, a cache partitioning scheme is used to accomodate both the prefetching and the native caching strategy. If not restrained in some fashion, inaccurate prefetches could easily degrade the I/O performance by wasting valuable resources. To overcome this, we design, implement, and evaluate a cache partitioning algorithm that utilizes CPU resources to compute more insightful cache allocation decisions.

Yushu Xi [08/2011 - 07/2012] (Doctoral Student, Auburn University)

Dissertation Research: Improving Reliability of Cluster Storage Systems.
We are investigating a wide range of approaches to improving reliability of large-scale cluster storage systems.

Fangyang Shen [07/2007 - 08/2008 | Publications Total: 3; Journal Papers: 0; Conference Papers: 3] (Ph.D., Summer 2008)

Now: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Northern New Mexico College
Research Project: Reliability Models of Energy-Efficient Parallel Disk Systems with Data Mirroring.
In this project we make use of a Markov process to develop a quantitative reliability model for energy-efficient parallel disk systems with data mirroring. With the new models in place, a reliability analysis tool is developed to efficiently evaluate reliability of fault-tolerant parallel disk systems with multiple power states.

Wei Luo [06/2005 - 08/2008 | Awards: 5 | Publications Total: 7; Journal Papers: 3; Conference Papers: 4] (Ph.D., Summer 2008, HUST)

Now: Research Scientist at China Ship Design and Development Center
Dissertation Research: Fault-Tolerant Scheduling for Heterogeneous Systems.
In this project we first proposed novel reliability models tailored for preemptive periodic tasks. Next, we developed an array of real-time fault-tolerant scheduling algorithms for heterogeneous systems. Read more...

Cong Liu [07/2007 - 08/2008 | Publications] (M.S., Spring 2008)

Now: Doctoral Student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Project: Distributed Energy-Efficient Scheduling for Real-time Data-Intensive Applications.
We address in this project the issue of energy-efficient scheduling for data grids supporting real-time and data-intensive applications. Taking into account both data locations and application properties, we designed a novel Distributed Energy-Efficient Scheduler (or DEES for short) that aims to seamlessly integrate the process of scheduling tasks with data placement strategies to provide energy savings.

Nicholas W. O'Connor [01/2006 - 05/2007 | Awards Total: 1 | Publications Conference Papers: 2] (Master's Student, New Mexico Tech)

Research Project: Energy Consumption Models for Disk Systems.
This study addresses the issue of modeling energy consumption in server and embedded disk systems. Read more...

Raghava K. Vudata [01/2007 - 06/2007 | Publications Total: 1] (M.S., New Mexico Tech)

Research Project: Fault Tolerance and Security Management.
In this study we investigate an approach to integrating a checkpionting technique with a quality of security control mechanism for real-time systems.. Read more...

Anand Paturi [01/2007-05/2007] (Doctoral Student, New Mexico Tech)

Research Project: QoS-Aware Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks.
Wireless sensor networks are likely to support a wide spectrum of next-generation applications such as wildlife monitoring and earthquake monitoring applications. In this project, we will study quality-of-service (QoS) and energy conservation issues in modern wireless sensor networks. We aim to develop an approach to minimizing energy dissipation in wireless sensor networks subject to QoS constraints.

Ashwin Tamilarasan [08/2006 - 06/2007, M.S. New Mexico Tech] Now: Software Engineer, EMC Corporation

Research Project: Quality of Security Control for Energy-Efficient Storage Systems.
We are in a process of developing a quality of security control mechanism for energy-efficient systems.

Menglei Tang [08/2006 - 12/2006] (Doctoral Student, New Mexico Tech)

Research Project: Parallel Database Systems on Clusters.

Xinfa Hu [08/2005- 12/2005, Doctoral Student, New Mexico Tech]

Now: Doctoral Student, New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Research Project: Communication-Aware Utility-Based Resource Allocation in Distributed Real-Time Systems.
This study is focused on the development of a novel utility model that is aware of commutation cost and benefits. We designed a resource allocation algorithm that aims at maximizing both communication and computation utility of a distributed real-time system.