DataSys: Data-Intensive Distributed Systems LaboratoryData-Intensive Distributed Systems Laboratory

Illinois Institute of Technology
Department of Computer Science

Kevin Brandstatter receives CRA Undergraduate Researcher Award 2013 (Honorable Mention)

May 6th, 2013

Kevin Brandstatter receives CRA Undergraduate Researcher Award 2013 (Honorable Mention). This is an extremely prestigious and competitive award, given to the best and brightest undergraduate students. The award is given based on the student's research work and results. Kevin is a junior in the Computer Science program at Illinois Institute of Technology, and has been an undergraduate research assistant in the DataSys Laboratory for over 2 years.

He has worked on a variety of projects, ranging from mobile application development (e.g. CiteSearcher, http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/projects/CiteSearcher/), to storage systems in distributed systems (e.g. NoVoHT and ZHT, http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/projects/ZHT/). His work has lead to 2 research papers and 6 posters being published in 2012 and 2013. Kevin's major research contributions revolve around the design and implementation of NoVoHT, a Lightweight Dynamic Persistent NoSQL Key/Value Store. NoVoHT’s novel features are:

  • Lock-Free: Support for unconventional operation such as append, allowing the efficiently support of lock-free concurrent modification operations
  • Dynamic: Support live migration across physical nodes
  • Lightweight: Micro-benchmarks delivering over 165K+ operations/second on single-node deployment up to 32X faster than existing systems
  • Persistent: Combines memory mapped and disk mapped approaches to deliver both fast data access and high data resilience at the same time
  • Real-System: Adopted by ZHT and deployed on IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at 32K-core scales

Kevin has spent his summers outside IIT, getting exposed to other real world challenges by being an intern in two world class research labs (Accenture Technology Labs and Max Planck Institute Germany). Kevin has done an amazing job learning about distributed systems, and applying his knowledge to some of the most challenging research problems in storage systems and cloud computing!

More information about Kevin can be found at http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/~kbrandst/.