I am interested in the areas of Distributed Computing, High-performance Systems, Virtualization Technologies, and Autonomic Computing. Currently my research is focused on File System/Storage Virtualization,
Grid Data Management, and Virtual Machine based Resource Management, under the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Renato Figueiredo. I am a member of the Advanced Computing and Information Systems
Laboratory, directed by Dr. José Fortes.
Today's large distributed applications require tremendous amounts of data and resources, supported by computer systems with increasing
scale, complexity and dynamism. It is often difficult to make effective use of resources and execute applications with desired
quality-of-service in such environments. My goal is to explore novel data and resource management solutions, using grid, virtualization
and autonomic techniques, to provide high-performance, robust and secure computing.
The following highlights the projects of my research:
-
Grid Virtual File System
GVFS is a virtualized distributed file system that provides high-performance and secure data access in
grid/wide-area environments, and allows for seamless integration with unmodified applications. GVFS helps
users access grid data in the same way as using traditional LAN file systems. It is also an integral part
of the In-VIGO grid virtualization middleware.
[More info]
-
QoS-driven Management of Virtualized Resources
On-demand computing with networked data-centers poses challenging problems of delivering expected QoS and doing so with acceptable management complexity. This project studies autonomic architectures and mechanisms for cooperative resource allocation and QoS delivery by virtualized data centers, in which application services are provided in virtual-machine based execution environments.
[More info]
-
Cyberinfrastructure for Dynamic Data-driven Brain-machine Interfaces (DDD-BMI)
The goal of DDD-BMI is to model brain from experiments with live subjects and to design brain-inspired assistive systems. This project develops a middleware-based cyberinfrastructure to support this time-critical and resource-demanding application. The resulting cyber-workstation enables BMI experiments to be conducted in a closed-loop manner, including in vivo brain signals acquisition, reliable network messging, parallel BMI computing, and real-time robot control.
[More info]
-
Data Provisioning for Grid Computing on Virtualized End-Resources
Grid computing with virtual machines promises the capability of provisioning a secure and highly flexible
computing environment for users. This project develops middleware to provide efficient data management
service for grid VMs (for both VM states and user data). It can be applied to VMs of different kinds
(VMware, Xen, UML etc.).
[More info]
-
Application-Tailored Grid Data Management with WSRF-based Services
This project focuses on novel data management middleware that leverages Web Service
Resource Framework to schedule, customize and monitor dynamic Grid data sessions.
Application-tailored session configurations enable the selection of both performance-related
features (partial/whole-file transfers, cache and consistency models) and reliability features
(copy-on-write checkpointing, replication, failure detection and data access redirection).
[More info]
- Dynamic Policy Disk Caching for Storage Networking
Proposed client-side disk caching to solve the scalability problem for storage networking. Designed and implemented the dm-cache kernel module, a generic block-level disk cache that supports transparent caching for different types of storage networks and enables policy-guided dynamic cache customizations.
[More info]
-
Parallel Computing on Heterogeneous Distributed Clusters
Coupling clusters in grid environments is important to harness existing resources for large
scale problem solving and multi-institutional cooperation. In this project a MPI-coupling
technique (PACX-MPI) and a grid-wide file system (GVFS) are combined to support
parallel computing on distributed, heterogeneous and cross-domain clusters.
-
Fine-Grain Grid Data Management and Applications in LSS Medical Imaging
This project aims to improve the state-of-the-art in data management techniques for grids to
allow seamless and high-performance integration of data generated by medical devices with
distributed computers. It enables the deployments of network-computing based medical
applications (e.g. Light-Scattering Spectroscopy analysis) for early cancer detection.
|
Journals
-
"Distributed File System Virtualization Techniques Supporting On-Demand Virtual Machine Environments for Grid Computing"
Ming Zhao, Jian Zhang and Renato J. Figueiredo
Journal on Cluster Computing, Volume 9, Number 1, January 2006, Pages: 45 - 56.
-
"From Virtualized Resources to Virtual Computing Grids: The In-VIGO System"
S. Adabala, V. Chadha, P. Chawla, R. J. Figueiredo, J. A. B. Fortes, I. Krsul, A. Matsunaga, M. Tsugawa, J. Zhang, M. Zhao,
L. Zhu, and X. Zhu
Journal of Future Generation Computing Systems, Vol. 21, No. 6, June 2005.
-
"A Human-Computer Interaction System for Content-Based Image Retrieval on Internet"
Ming Zhao and Gang Rong
Journal of Tsinghua University (Science & Technology, Special Issue), August 2001.
-
"Modeling of Branching Structures of Plants"
Zhi Wang, Ming Zhao, and Qi-Xing Yu
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 209(4):383-94, April 2001.
-
"An Approach to Automated Palmprint Recognition Based on K-L Transform"
Ming Zhao, Wei Shu, Gaing Rong, and Zhaoqi Bian
n Journal of Tsinghua University (Science & Technology), vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 100-103, September 2000.
Conference Proceedings
- A User-level Secure Grid File System
Ming Zhao and Renato J. Figueiredo
Supercomputing (The International Confernece for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) (SC07), November 2007.
(Acceptance Rate: 20%)
- Experimental Study of Virtual Machine Migration in Support of Reservation of Cluster Resources
Ming Zhao and Renato J. Figueiredo
2nd International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (held in conjunction with SC07) (VTDC 2007),, November 2007.
- On the Use of Fuzzy Modeling in Virtualized Data Center Management
Jing Xu, Ming Zhao, José A. B. Fortes, Robert Carpenter, Mazin Yousif
4th International Conference on Autonomic Computing, June 2007 (ICAC 2007), June 2006.
(Acceptance Rate: 14%, Best Student Paper)
- Towards Real-Time Distributed Signal Modeling for Brain Machine Interfaces
J. DiGiovanna, L. Marchal, P. Rattanatamrong, M. Zhao, S. Darmanjian, B. Mahmoudi, J. C. Sanchez, J. C. Principe, L. Hermer-Vazquez, R. Figueiredo, and J. Fortes
International Conference on Computational Science, Beijing, China, May 2007.
- Application-Tailored Cache Consistency for Wide-Area File Systems
Ming Zhao and Renato J. Figueiredo
26th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2006), July 2006.
(Acceptance Rate: 13%)
- Towards Autonomic Grid Data Management with Virtualized Distributed File Systems
Ming Zhao, Jing Xu and Renato J. Figueiredo
3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2006), June 2006.
(Acceptance Rate: 20%)
- On the Use of Virtualization and Service Technologies to Enable Grid-Computing
A. Matsunaga, M. Tsugawa, M. Zhao, L. Zhu, V. Sanjeepan, S. Adabala, R. Figueiredo, H. Lam and J. A.B. Fortes
11th International Euro-Par Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, p. 1, August 2005.
- Supporting Application-Tailored Grid File System Sessions with WSRF-Based Services
Ming Zhao, Vineet Chadha and Renato J. Figueiredo
14th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
(HPDC'05), Pages: 24-33, July 2005.
(Acceptance Rate: 17%, Top 5 Best Papers)
- Distributed File System Support for Virtual Machines in Grid Computing
Ming Zhao, Jian Zhang and Renato J. Figueiredo
13th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC'04), Pages: 202-211,
June 2004. (Acceptance Rate: 15%)
- Support for Data-Intensive, Variable-Granularity Grid
Applications via Distributed File System Virtualization - A Case Study of Light Scattering Spectroscopy
Jithendar Paladugula, Ming Zhao and Renato J. Figueiredo
2nd International Workshop on Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments (CLADE/2004), Pages: 12-21,
June 2004.
Technical Reports
- Dynamic Policy Disk Caching for Storage Networking
Eric Van Hensbergen and Ming Zhao
IBM Research Report (RC24123), November 2006. (Research during summer internship at IBM Research Austin Lab.)
- Proxy Managed Client-Side Disk Caching for the Virtual File System
Ming Zhao and Renato J. Figueiredo
Tech. Rep. TR-04-001, ACIS Laboratory, University of Florida, November 2004.
|
- A User-level Secure Grid File System
Supercomputing (The International Confernece for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) (SC07), November 2007.
- Experimental Study of Virtual Machine Migration in Support of Reservation of Cluster Resources
2nd International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (held in conjunction with SC07) (VTDC 2007),, November 2007.
- Study of Erasure Coding and its Application on Building Reliable Distributed File System
ECE, Univ. of Florida, April 2007.
- File System Virtualization and Services for Grid Data Management (PhD Proposal)
ECE, Univ. of Florida, November 2006.
- Dynamic Policy Disk Cache for Storage Networking
IBM Research Seminar, August 2006.
- Application-Tailored Cache Consistency for Wide-Area File Systems
26th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2006), July 2006.
- Towards Autonomic Grid Data Management with Virtualized Distributed File Systems
3rd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2006), June 2006.
- Performance Analysis of Xen: Intel VT-x vs. Native x86
ECE, Univ. of Florida, April 2006.
- Supporting Application-Tailored Grid File System Sessions with WSRF-Based Services
14th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing
(HPDC'05), July 2005.
- A Case Study of Using MPI on Clusters in Grid Environments
ECE, Univ. of Florida, April 2005.
- Distributed File System Support for Virtual Machines in Grid Computing
13th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC'04), June 2004.
- Support for Data-Intensive, Variable-Granularity Grid
Applications via Distributed File System Virtualization - A Case Study of Light Scattering Spectroscopy
2nd International Workshop on Challenges of Large Applications in Distributed Environments (CLADE/2004), June 2004.
- Layer 3 Virtual Networking for Virtual Machines
ECE, Univ. of Florida, December 2003.
|
designed/developed by me. I was the Vice President of FACSS in 2003-2004. 
designed/developed by me. I serve as the Web Chair of ICAC'08.
designed/developed by me. I served as the Web Chair of ICAC'07. 
