Mosharaf Chowdhury named Morris Wellman Professor

Assistant professor Mosharaf Chowdhury has been named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor. The professorship is awarded to junior faculty members in recognition of outstanding contributions to teaching and research.

Chowdhury leads SymbioticLab, which tailors Big Data and AI applications to coexist with their underlying networks and applies networking principles in designing new data systems. His research supports a wide variety of data systems, ranging from those running on networks with single-microsecond latency to those running over the Internet.

He recently received an NSF CAREER award in support of a project aimed at memory disaggregation, which takes advantage of emerging low-latency networks to expose all the unused memory in a data cluster as a single, massive memory unit in order to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications that require low latency and the use of massive amounts of data. His recent work on remote memory prefetching has resulted in a system called Leap, which earned a Best Paper Award at the 2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. His other ongoing projects include federated computation, systems for AI, big data systems, and datacenter networking. 

Chowdhury invented coflows – a technique for bridging the gap between application-level performance and network-level optimizations – and is a co-creator of Apache Spark, an open-source general-purpose cluster-computing framework that provides an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Software artifacts from his research have been deployed in Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon datacenters. 

He received the NSF CAREER award in 2019, the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM doctoral dissertation award, best paper awards at NSDI and ATC, multiple faculty fellowships and awards from Google, VMware, and Alibaba, as well as a Facebook fellowship and a Cheriton Scholarship. He had also been nominated for an NSDI community award and a University of Waterloo alumni gold medal. Chowdhury received his PhD from the AMPLab at UC Berkeley in 2015.

About the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship

Michael P. Wellman, the Richard H. Orenstein Division Chair of Computer Science and Engineering and Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, endowed the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professorship in his grandfather’s name. Morris Wellman was an engineer who worked for most of his career as a civil servant of the City of New York.