arifa.nisar 'AT' eecs.northwestern.edu
Biographical Summary
I am a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow at University of California Santa Cruz, in the Department of Computer Science. I am a member of the Storage Systems Research Center, and I am working with Dr. Ethan Miller .I completed my Ph.D at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University in Octobor 2010 under the guidance of Prof. Alok Choudhary and Prof. Wei-keng Liao at Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security.
I interned in Network File Systems group at IBM Research Almaden in summer 2008. I received Givens Associate Fellowship from Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory in summer 2007. Previously I have worked as embedded software engineer at Real Time Operating System Division at Mentor Graphics Lahore, Pakistan from 2003 to 2006. Earlier I have received my Bachelor degree from Department of Electrical Engineering at University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan in 2002.Research Interests
I am investigating high performance storage solutions for large scale simulations of natural and controlled phenomena. I have designed and implemented portable solutions for parallel storage which seamlessly improve the overall performance of computational intensive applications manyfold. My research work demonstrates the capability of improving real data intensive applications like combustion, molecular dynamics, fusion, and climate prediction simulations.I am also developing benchmarking tools for parallel file systems to determine the best I/O access strategies for a given parallel storage configuration. One such I/O benchmark software has been successfully tested with many Lustre file system deployments to suggest the most optimal I/O access patterns. This I/O benchmark software package is under preparation for public release.