Anshul Gandhi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, received a grant from the National Science Foundation for his novel research on modeling cloud applications.

Gandhi’s grant, for $173,229, will begin on Sept. 1, 2015 and was awarded on behalf of his project, CRII: CSR: Online performance modeling of opaque cloud applications.

As the Principal Investigator, Gandhi’s research will uncover the challenges and solutions involved in promoting efficient use of the cloud.

This research will develop novel performance models to help users and Commerce Service Providers (CSPs) understand the dynamic resource requirements of cloud applications without requiring any extensive benchmarking or instrumentation. The research team is constructing novel workload-specific performance models that capture the relationship between cloud resource allocation and application performance. The resulting models will enable users and CSPs to accurately allocate cloud resources to achieve optimal desired application performance.

Dr. Ari Kaufman, Chairman and Distinguished Professor in the CS department congratulated Gandhi on his recent awarded and added, “The department fully supports Anshul’s research. In addition to potentially improving cloud performance, Gandhi will be mentoring students throughout the process.”

Gandhi joined the Stony Brook faculty in fall 2014. Prior to Stony Brook, Gandhi completed his postdoctoral research in the Cloud Optimization and Analytics group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He earned his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. Gandhi’s academic interests include leveraging mathematical tools such as performance modeling, queuing theory, and control theory to analyze the behavior of systems, such as distributed systems, cloud, and data centers, in order to optimize performance, energy and power.