Mosharaf Chowdhury receives Google Faculty Research Award

Assistant Professor Mosharaf Chowdhury has been awarded a 2016 Google Faculty Research Award for his work in network-aware analytics of geo-distributed datasets.

The award is for the proposal entitled “Application-Network Symbiosis in Geo-Distributed Analytics,” which was submitted by Prof. Chowdhury and his collaborator Prof. Aditya Akella from the Dept. of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Their proposal aims to create a new software stack for analytics over geo-distributed datasets. To ensure high performance in the face of potential data movement constraints, limited wide area network (WAN) bandwidth, and high WAN latencies, the authors advocate application-network symbiosis wherein query optimizers are aware of WAN bottlenecks and variance in WAN capacity, and the network routes and schedules data transfers to directly improve application-level performance.

The researchers’ approach represents an improvement over existing techniques, which focus on improving individual layers of big data stacks to meet specific objectives such as minimizing bandwidth usage. In such systems, different layers of the analytics stack act independently and can take contradictory decisions, canceling each other out.

Prof. Chowdhury’s research interests are in the areas of networked systems and cloud computing. In his dissertation research, he explored and developed algorithms and systems for application-aware coflow scheduling, allocation, and load balancing of networked resources in the context of large-scale data-intensive computing.

Prof. Chowdhury received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and joined the faculty at Michigan in January 2016. He teaches EECS 582, Advanced Operating Systems, and is affiliated with the Software Systems Lab.

About the Google Faculty Research Award

The Google Faculty Research Awards program is a competitive worldwide program intended to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia. The intent of the awards program is to support academic research that is aligned with Google’s mission. The awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.