Gu Receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, an assistant professor of computer science, will receive $450,000 from the National Science Foundation for research in networking and computer systems.

Gu received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award for her project, “Enable Robust Virtualized Hosting Infrastructures via Coordinated Learning, Recovery and Diagnosis.”

The proposal is designed to find the most efficient and effective ways to fix unexpected system anomalies that are often caused by software bugs or hardware failure.

The project, backed by the NSF’s Division of Computer and Network Systems, aims to find solutions to performance glitches in large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures. Like the ‘cloud,’ virtualized hosting allows multiple domain names to use one server and share resources. Gu will handle functioning issues in distributed systems using online learning, first-response recovery and diagnosis.

The prototype generated in the project will be used in the Virtual Computing Lab at NC State, an educational computing platform for K-12 primary schools, community colleges and other public universities.

The NSF Career Award is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty in science and engineering.

Gu has filed eight patents and landed research awards from Google and IBM. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Peking University in China and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in computer science.