Computer Science Professor Xian-He Sun Recognized with 2009 Sigma Xi Research Award
The Graduate College announced the recipients of the 2009 Sigma Xi Research Awards (Faculty Division) at a reception on April 22. The Sigma Xi Research Awards recognize exemplary accomplishments in research, scholarship, and creative activity by faculty members and graduate students at IIT.
Computer Science professor Xian-He Sun was recognized with the 2009 Sigma Xi Research Award (Senior Faculty Division). Sun is a renowned scientist who has made remarkable contributions to the field of computer science, especially in the field of high performance computing and communication. He is an authority on scalable computing, where computing power can be scaled up to meet a users demand by harnessing computing resources on the network.
Sun has authored or co-authored more than 120 publications, and much of his work has had lasting impact. For instance, he was one of the first researchers to provide a theoretical treatment of data implication, where one date query may imply another query. After more than 15 years, this work is still relevant and applicable to fields where memory is limited and many of the data requests must be served off-line via query implication. These fields include databases, information retrieval, and even cell phone design.
Sun was one of the first researchers to identify the "memory wall," the disparity between advancement of computing and memory technologies. CPU performance has doubled every eighteen months, but memory performance has only improved at an average rate of nine percent per year for the last twenty years. Thus, data access performance is the new bottleneck to sustained system performance rather than computing power. Sun has presented a formulation to describe the memory impact on performance, and his work is well recognized in the computer science community.
Sun received a Ph.D. in computer science from Michigan State University in 1990. He joined IIT in the fall of 1999 as an associate professor of computer science and in 2002 was promoted to the rank of professor. During his career, Sun has received more than 25 grants, two patents, and has been actively involved in educating IIT students. He has supervised 12 Ph.D. students, more than 20 masters students, and several undergraduate students. Sun also serves on the editorial board of five professional journals, and has organized more than 20 professional conferences and workshops, including the flagship conference in supercomputing, IEEE SuperComputing.
Reprinted from IIT Today
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