Balancing computing power, storage demands goal of Virginia Tech CAREER project

Ali R. Butt is attempting to develop a data storage framework attuned to the ever-increasing demands of modern HPC environments. Click here for more information.

Blacksburg, Va. — Ali R. Butt, an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, has received a $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, which is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for creative junior faculty who are considered to be future leaders in their academic fields.

The goal of Butt’s CAREER research is to address the increasing performance gap between computing power and storage technology, especially for high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Modern scientific computations often require analysis of information from a large number of devices, such as measurements from temperature and humidity sensors distributed across a region for monitoring the climate and forecasting environmental impacts. These complex applications require powerful computing resources and entail managing an ever-growing amount of data.

“In terms of high-performance computing power, we are seeing systems with tens-of-thousands or more processors that reach terabyte speeds,” Butt said. Terabyte speed is the processing of one trillion instructions per second.