Ningfang Mi
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Contact
- ningfang@ece.neu.edu
- 302 Dana Research Center
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Social Media
Office
- 617.373.3028
Related Links
Research Focus
Capacity planning; NVMe Flash Memory Devices, MapReduce/Hadoop scheduling; cloud computing; resource management; performance evaluation; workload characterization; simulation
About
Ningfang Mi is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, since Fall 2009. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary, VA in 2009. She received the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas, TX in 2004 and the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China, in 2000. Her research interests include storage systems, multi-tier systems, performance evaluation, energy/power management, simulation, data analysis, system modeling, and scheduling/load balancing.
Education
- PhD, College of William and Mary, 2009
Honors & Awards
- 2015 NSF CAREER Award
- IBM Faculty Award
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award
Research Overview
Capacity planning; NVMe Flash Memory Devices, MapReduce/Hadoop scheduling; cloud computing; resource management; performance evaluation; workload characterization; simulation
Department Research Areas
Selected Publications
- J. Bhimani, N. Mi, Z. Yang, J. Yang, R.Pandurangan, C.Choi, V. Balakrishnan, FIOS: Feature Based I/O Stream Identification for Improving Endurance of Multi-Stream SSDs, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD’18), 2018, (Best Paper Award)
- J. Bhimani, Z. Yang, N. Mi, J.Yang, Q.Xu, M. Awasthi, R. Pandurangan, V. Balakrishnan, Docker Container Scheduler for I/O Intensive Applications running on NVMe SSDs, IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems (TMSCS), 2018
- Z. Yang, M. Hoseinzadeh, P. Wong, J. Artoux, C. Mayers, D.T. Evans, R.T. Bolt, J. Bhimani, N. Mi, S. Swanson, H-NVMe: A Hybrid Framework of NVMe-based Storage System in Cloud Computing Environment , 36th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC’17), San Diego, CA, 2017. (Best Paper Award)
- H. Gao, Z. Yang, J. Bhimani, T. Wang, J. Wang, N. Mi, B. Sheng, AutoPath: Harnessing Parallel Execution Paths for Efficient Resource Allocation in Multi-Stage Big Data Frameworks, The 26th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, Vancouver, Canada, 2017
- J. Bhimani, N. Mi, M. Leeser, Z. Yang, FiM: Performance Prediction for Parallel Computation in Iterative Data Processing Applications, IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, Honolulu, Hawaii, 2017
- Y. Yao, J. Wang, B. Sheng, C.C. Tan, N. Mi, Self-Adjusting Slot Configurations for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Hadoop Clusters, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 5(2), 2017, 344-357
Aug 28, 2020
Best Paper Award at IEEE HPEC 2020
Computer engineering PhD student Mahsa Bayati (PhD’20), ECE Professor Miriam Leeser, Associate Professor Ningfang Mi were awarded the Outstanding Student Paper Award for their paper “Exploiting GPU Direct Access to Non-Volatile Memory to Accelerate Big Data Processing” at the 2020 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC).

Jul 15, 2020
Creating High Performance and Reliable Storage Systems
ECE Associate Professor Ningfang Mi, in collaboration with Florida International University, was awarded a $500K NSF grant for “New Techniques for I/O Behavior Modeling and Persistent Storage Device Configuration”.

Jul 10, 2020
Northeastern Leads Organization of ACM SIGMETRICS 2020
Northeastern University recently led the organization of ACM SIGMETRICS 2020, which is the flagship conference of the ACM in the area of performance analysis of computer systems, and the development of tools and innovative application of tools towards this end.

Jul 10, 2018
Professor Mi and PhD Students Win Best Paper at IEEE CLOUD 2018
ECE Associate Professor Ningfang Mi and two of her PhD students, Janki Bhimani and Zhengyu Yang, were awarded the 11th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD 2018) Best Paper, “FIOS: Feature Based I/O Stream Identification for Improving Endurance of Multi-Stream SSDs.”

Dec 15, 2017
Associate Professor Mi Awarded $200K Grant from Samsung
ECE Associate Professor Ningfang Mi has been awarded a $200K grant from Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. for a project titled “Dynamic Resource Allocation Scheme for Virtualized Storage with Flash-Memory Resources.”

Dec 14, 2017
Professor Mi and PhD Students Win Best Paper at IPCCC’17
ECE Professor Ningfang Mi and two of her PhD students, Zhengyu Yang and Janki Bhimani, won the best paper award at the 36th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC’17) in San Diego, California.

Mar 05, 2015
Assistant Professor Ningfang Mi Receives NSF CAREER Award
ECE Assistant Professor Ningfang Mi has been awarded a $459K NSF CAREER Award for her project, Capacity Planning Methodologies for Large Clusters with Heterogeneous Architectures and Diverse Applications.

Jul 31, 2014
Northeastern Engineering announces 8 Young Investigator Awards in 2013-2014
These faculty recognitions bring the total young investigator awards in the college to 39, including 25 NSF CAREER and 10 DOD Young Investigator awards.
Jul 15, 2014
Prof. Ningfang Mi on Predicting the Unpredictable
There’s an almost mythical quality to Professor Ningfang Mi’s work in computing resource management and capacity planning. Her research aims to revolutionize the behind-the-scenes operations of the Internet and cloud computing to increase quality, improve efficiency, and decrease costs. But in a world with billions of web pages and billions of Internet users, this is […]

Apr 07, 2014
Computing’s invisible challenge
To us, it may not seem like a big deal: CNN’s website is taking too long to load. The day’s most popular YouTube video won’t stop buffering. “Twitter is over capacity.” While these little hiccups in usability may frustrate end users, they merely scratch the surface of the enormous technical challenge that’s confronting the backend. Northeastern University […]