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CS Grad Student Awarded IBM PhD Scholarship

June 7, 2012

UNM Computer Science Ph.D. student Scott Levy was recently awarded a prestigious IBM Ph.D. Scholarship. This highly-competitive award recognizes his promising research into algorithms and system design techniques that enable resilient computation on distributed systems.

As distributed systems grow in size and complexity, the number of node failures observed in the system will also grow, impairing the system's ability to make progress. A common cause of node failures in distributed systems is ECC memory errors.

Levy is currently working with Professor Patrick Bridges on techniques to allow computation to continue without a reboot despite ECC errors. He is also working with Professor Jared Saia to approach this problem from a algorithmic perspective. The goal of his work in this area is to design algorithms that allow distributed computation to continue even if some fraction of the nodes in the system fail before the computation completes. Levy is co-advised by Dr. Patrick Bridges and Dr. Dorian Arnold.