Shuai Mu has been awarded the distinguished National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER). NSF’s $500k in funding supports the project Rethinking Replication in Highly Available and Reliable Data Stores.

Whether it is social media, online shopping, banking or cloud services, replicated data are crucial in delivering reliable and easily accessible user services. Replicated data stores are a type of database system which create and maintain multiple copies of the same data across different servers. Storage of this data has to be fast, reliable, and efficient to ensure consistency and limit errors. 

To tolerate failures, data stores need to replicate data across different geographical locations, i.e., geo-replication. Through this research, Mu aims to improve system performance by examining and rethinking current replication schemas for geographically distributed data stores. He points out that “despite it being a challenging task, with the new replication designs, the system can avoid failures, thus achieving better system throughput.”

This research has the potential to significantly influence both industry and society as distributed systems are fundamental components of modern computing infrastructures such as datacenters and high performance computing. In addition, Mu’s CAREER research will directly impact students at Stony Brook University who will have the option to be part of new multidisciplinary courses in the area of cloud computing and distributed systems. 

“Shuai is an integral part of our department’s systems faculty. His work on fault tolerance for distributed systems already got significant attention. This CAREER project is important not only for his development as a researcher, but also for the department,” says Samir Das, chair of the Department of Computer Science.