Eugster Receives Google Research Award

02-22-2013

Associate Professor of Computer Science Patrick Eugster is the recipient of a sponsored research award from Google. Google Research Awards are "structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world." Eugster's award amounts to $59,000 for one year.

The project that earned this Google Research Award is titled Geo-Distributed Big Data Processing, and it is joint work with Ph.D. students Chamikara Jayalath and Julian Stephen and postdoctoral research assistant Kirill Kogan.

Eugster, who joined the Department of Computer Science in Spring 2006, provides a brief description of their project: "The vision of omni-present computing resources - used, for instance, for handling big data - remains a sales pitch of cloud providers, which is implemented by concrete datacenters whose location matters. As a consequence of the illusion of location-independence, current systems for analyzing big data perform poorly, if at all, across datacenter boundaries, while more and more big data analysis jobs involve more than one datacenter.

"The goal of this project is to design and implement big data analysis tools that operate efficiently across multiple datacenters and cloud vendors, by taking into account locations and characteristics of (sub)datasets, network topologies and bandwidth, etc. The 'Atmosphere' system connects computing clouds much in the way real clouds are surrounded by the atmosphere."

Congratulations to Professor Eugster and his team on this award!