Research Interests

• Database systems, big data analytics and social networks
• Cloud Computing, parallel and distributed systems
• Security and privacy for cloud and network systems
• Parallel I/O, file and storage systems
• High performance computing, computational biology and geoscience

Research Group Members

• Ph.D. Students:
  1. Fahim Chowdhury (From August 2017)
  2. Ian Fang (From May 2019)
  3. Ismail Ataie (From Oct 2019)
  4. Fazle Rahat (From August 2022)
  5. Hyunjin yi (From August 2022)
• Master Students
  • Chris Holder (From August 2022)
• Undergraduate Students
  • Alex De Sabatino (since Jan 2019)

Research Projects (not a full list)

• GPU Processor and Memory Architectures
• Hadoop Acceleration through fast data movement
• High-Performance Burst Buffer Systems
• CSR: Small: XooMR: Cross-Layer and Cross-Phase Cooperation for Fair and Efficient MapReduce Cloud Computing, parallel and distributed systems.
• EAGER: Tadoop: A Dual-Purpose Framework Taming the Bipolarity of Storage and Communication for High-Performance Computing and Data Analytics

Publications: click here.

Research Honors and Recognitions

1. 2012 Alabama Innovation Award. Dr. Yu is selected as one of the 15 Alabama Innovation Awardees by Governor Bentley. War Eagle!
2. 2012 ACM SRC Award. Ph.D. student Yuan Tian was selected as the First Place Graduate Winner in the ACM 2012 SRC Grand Finals. Ms. Tian and Dr. Yu attended the 2012 ACM Awards Ceremony. War Eagle!
3. 2011 Keynote Talk on Big Data at HPC Workshop. Dr. Yu gave a Keynote Talk on "Enabling Big Data Analytics in the Cloud with Hadoop Acceleration" at the HPC Advisory Council Workshop, Held in conjunction with HPC China. Jinan, China. October 2011.
4. 2011 Outstanding Research Contribution to Mellanox. Dr. Yu Recognized for Outstanding Research Contribution to Hadoop Acceleration, 2011. Mellanox Technologies.
5. SC 2011 George Michael HPC Fellowship. Ph.D. student Xinyu Que won the George Michael HPC Fellowship award in the 2011 ACM/IEEE Conference for Supercomputing (SC'11). November 2011, Seattle, WA.
6. First Prize in ICS 2011 SRC. Ph.D. student Yuan Tian won the First Prize research competition in the 2011 ACM International Conference for Supercomputing (ICS'11), June 2011, Tucson, AZ.
7. Auburn 2009 URF Fellowship. Undergraduate student Patrick Carpenter won Auburn Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Auburn University, Office of Provost in April 2009.

Software Products Featured by Press Releases

1. Big Data Analytics through Hadoop Acceleration
• November 2011. Mellanox Announces Availability of UDA 2.0 for the acceleration of Big Data Analytics. UDA is jointly developed by the Auburn PASL group headed by Dr. Weikuan Yu and Mellanox. Announcements made at Yahoo.com, businesswire.com and mellanox.com
2. Software Contribution to ADIOS at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• September 2010, Say Hello the New ADIOS. HPCWire.com
• October 2010. ADIOS Ignites Combustion Simulations. HPCWire.com
• July 2011. ORNL ADIOS Team Releases Version 1.3 of Adaptive Input/Output System.

Tutorials and Invited Talks (since 2011)

1. Invited Talk at UA Tuscaloosa: Hadoop with Scalable Algorithms. Aug 2012. Tuscaloosa, AL.
2. Invited Panel Talk at GaTech: Big Data Challenges and Opportunities. Mar 2012. Atlanta, GA.
3. Invited Talk at IBM: Accelerating Hadoop through Scalable Merge Algorithms on RDMA networks. Mar 2012. Hawthorne, NY.
4. Kickoff Talk at NASA GSFC on Elastic Parallel I/O for Climate Simulation, Nov 2011. Greenbelt, Maryland.
5. Keynote Talk at the HPC Advisory Council Workshop on "Enabling Big Data Analytics in the Cloud with Hadoop Acceleration". Jinan, China. October 2011.
6. Invited Talks at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Oct 2011.
7. Invited Talk at GaTech in the 6th Open Cirrus Summit to leading researchers on cloud computing and big data analytics. Oct 2011. Atlanta, GA.
8. Hadoop tutorial in the 2011 Cluster Computing conference. Sept 2011, Austin, TX.
9. Invited Talk: enabling scalable I/O for NASA climate applications. ADIOS-3 Meeting, September 2011, Oak Ridge, TN.

Research Sponsors

• Governmental Agencies
1. National Science Foundation (NSF) (CRI, ACI and CNS programs)
2. Department of Energy (DOE) (SciDAC and FastOS programs)
3. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ROSES program)
4. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (various projects)
5. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Big Data Analytics)
6. Alabama Department of Commerce
7. Auburn University (Startup, URF and Breeden Projects)
• Industry
1. Intel (Big Data Analytics)
2. Mellanox (Cloud Computing)
3. NVIDIA (GPU acceleration)
4. Solarflare (Big Data)
5. Scitor (Image Processing)

Group Alumni

• Ph.D. Students and Their First Job Placements:
  1. Yuan Tian, February 2009 - August 2012, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
  2. Xinyu Que, August 2009 - May 2013, IBM T.J. Watson.
  3. Yandong Wang, August 2010 - May 2014, IBM T.J. Watson.
  4. Zhuo Liu, January 2011 - April 2015, Yahoo.
  5. Cong Xu, August 2010 - April 2015, Intel.
  6. Bin Wang, August 2010 - Aug 2015, Arista Networks.
  7. Teng Wang, August 2012 - March 2017, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
  8. Huansong Fu, August 2013 - December 2018, Argonne National Lab.
  9. Yue Zhu, May 2015 - April 2021, IBM Watson.
  10. Md Muhib Khan, August 2016 - July 2022, Facebook.
• Master Students and Their First Job Placements:
  1. Patrick Carpenter, Master (May 2012). Software Engineer at Amazon, Seattle.
  2. Cong Xu, Master (May 2012). Continued in the Ph.D. program.
  3. Xiaobing Li, Master (Aug 2013). Software Engineer at LogicMonitor Inc.
  4. Cristi Cira, Master (Aug 2014). Research Staff at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.
  5. Fang Zhou, Master (May 2015). Ph.D. program of Ohio State University.
  6. Kevin Vasko, Master (August 2015). Boeing (Research and Technology Group).
  7. Huansong Fu, Master (August 2015). Ph.D. program at FSU.
  8. Lizhen Shi, Master (August 2015). Ph.D. program at FSU.
  9. Hai Pham, Master (May 2016). Ph.D. program at CMU.
  10. Michael Pritchard, Master (May 2016). PhD program at Vanderbilt University.
  11. Harsh Kundnani, Master (June 2018). A startup company in Tallahassee, Florida.
  12. Rupak Roy, Master (April 2022). Intel.
  13. Subhadeep Bhattacharya, Master (August 2022). NVIDIA.
• Postdoctoral Researchers and their job placements:
  1. Hui Chen, 03/2014~05/2015, with Lousiana State Univ.
  2. Jianhui Yue, 10/2014~08/2015, Assistant Professor at Miami University (Ohio).
• Visiting Researchers:
  1. Chunxiang Wu, Visiting Scholar (May 2012), Wuhan University, China.
  2. Bongen Gu, Visiting Scholar (Aug 2011), Chungju National University, Korea.

For more info: CASTL Research Group