Shenoy
Receives NSF CAREER Award
Karen Chrisman SPECIAL
TO THE CHRONICLE
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August 25, 2000
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Prashant Shenoy, assistant professor of Computer
Science, recently received a CAREER award from the National Science
Foundation (NSF). The highly competitive awards are intended to help
junior faculty members develop careers in research and teaching.
From more than 2,000 applications, NSF annually selects 300-350
science and engineering faculty from across the country to receive
the four-year, $200,000 awards.
Shenoy's research group, the Laboratory for Advanced System
Software (LASS), acts as a glue between operating systems, computer
networks and the World Wide Web. His research focuses on the design
of servers and networks for multimedia and web-based
applications.
"The demands that such applications place on computer systems and
networks make this a very challenging problem to solve," says
Shenoy. Performance and scale are two key issues: servers must be
able to efficiently retrieve large quantities of data and networks
such as the Internet will need to deliver this data to users in a
timely manner.
His grant proposal, "Scalable High-performance Information
Servers for Internet-based Multimedia Applications," will
investigate solutions to this problem. It focuses on three areas:
Multimedia operating systems that run demanding applications;
multimedia file systems that store huge amounts of data; and proxy
servers that deliver this data over wide area networks such as the
Internet.
The ability to deal with heterogeneity in application
requirements and data characteristics is a driving force behind this
research. An important outcome of this research will be a prototype
system based on the Linux operating system that will demonstrate the
efficacy of the approach.
Given the commercial potential of this research, Shenoy
considered going into industry after receiving his Ph.D. in 1998,
but felt that the academic environment provided him more freedom to
do long-term research without the market pressures that exist in
industry. He was also extremely excited about being able to
collaborate with current faculty Jim Kurose, Krithi Ramamritham, and
Don Towsley, who are each highly regarded in their fields.
"Prashant's broad range of interests - combining multimedia,
operating systems and the World Wide Web - come together in this
CAREER grant. This is an exciting time to be investigating issues
that lie in the intersection of these areas, and Prashant is
uniquely positioned to carry them out," said Ramamritham.
Shenoy received his doctorate in 1998 from the University of
Texas at Austin where he was honored as having written the "Best
Doctoral Dissertation of 1998-99" in the computer science
department. |