Anshul Gandhi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, recently received the competitive IBM Faculty Award.

"The IBM Faculty Award is very prestigious, and represents IBM's endorsement of our research,” he said. “In addition to helping drive our cloud autoscaling research, the award will further strengthen collaborations between our group and IBM Research." Gandhi was awarded $10,000 for his project entitled, AutoScaling for Cloud Applications.

“This project aims to infer the resource requirements of opaque applications running in the cloud so as to enable online auto-scaling of the infrastructure to meet user-specified performance targets,” Gandhi explained.

According to Gandhi, the success of the project will significantly impact cloud adoption in private and public clouds. Small and medium businesses will find such a service attractive as it reduces the efforts they have to expend to efficiently leverage the cloud. Importantly, the research will enable performance-sensitive application owners to adopt the cloud for their hosting needs.

The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive global initiative intended on fostering collaboration between leading universities and IBM’s research, development, and service organizations. The program promotes innovative coursework to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographic areas that are strategic to IBM.

Gandhi joined the Stony Brook faculty this past fall semester. 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 received 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.