2011 IBM PhD Fellowship competition is won by an exceptional PhD student Vasily Tarasov from the Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University.

IBM Ph.D. Fellowship recipients are selected on the basis of outstanding research and technical excellence in areas of interest to IBM. These competitive fellowships provide a stipend, tuition and fees to the awardees. The fellowships are also structured to allow students to pursue a technical career in either IBM's Research Division or IBM's development laboratories.

This is a highly prestigious annual competition. Less than 10% of world-wide applicants make it to the 2nd selection phase, and fewer make it to the final award. Often, schools are also limited to submit no more than 1-2 names.

Prof. Zadok´s student, Vasily Tarasov is interested in studying scalability of Virtualization in today´s IT infrastructure. Tarasov's work proposes a design and implementation of an efficient mechanism for accessing Virtual Machine (VM) disk images over a network. The approach is universal across file systems used in VMs - ext2/3/4, xfs, NTFS, etc. - and improves VM's I/O performance for certain common workloads. The method was proposed based on the analysis of the numerous multi-layer traces. Further analysis will help to reveal more valuable optimizations. The final goal is to provide better performance of scalable NAS solutions, where the back-end file system is a distributed file system, such as GPFS. Only such solutions will be able to keep up with the scale of the future VM deployments.