PhD Spotlight: Rohan Basu Roy, PhD’24 – Computer Engineering
Originally from Calcutta, India, Rohan Basu Roy began his PhD journey at Northeastern in 2019 in the Goodwill Computing Lab, advised by Associate Professor Devesh Tiwari of electrical and computer engineering, after completing his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. From his undergraduate days, he was interested in computer systems and architecture, which inspired him to perform research on related topics in his PhD studies.
His research focuses on developing solutions for critical high performance computing (HPC) and distributed computing problems to enhance the experience of both users and service providers. To achieve this goal, his developed solutions improve the execution time of applications, reduce their execution cost and improve resource utilization of clusters by proper application scheduling. Unlike traditional approaches, Basu Roy solves these problems using novel cloud computing paradigms, such as serverless computing, which are generally used to run microservices and small applications. However, his research shows that with proper kernel modifications, serverless platforms can be leveraged to execute large-scale distributed applications, improving both performance and cost. Since dealing with serverless platforms requires extensive systems-level knowledge, one of the main goals of his research is to develop software and libraries to reduce the barrier of entry in serverless computing for HPC programmers.
His works have been published in top-tier computer science conferences, including Supercomputing, ASPLOS, PLDI, ISCA, ATC, HPCA, PPoPP, and others. His future plans include developing strategies to identify the relationship between HPC components and hardware to help in the disintegration of applications running in HPC super-facilities.
In addition to his research while at Northeastern, Basu Roy mentored graduate and undergraduate students and conducted tutorials on major computer science venues on the application of optimization techniques such as Bayesian Optimization for computer systems research. Following graduation, he plans to join a university as a faculty member and conduct research on operating systems and HPC.