Ningfang Mi
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Contact
- ningfang@ece.northeastern.edu
- 302 Dana Research Center
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Social Media
Office
- 302 Dana Research Center
- 617.373.3028
Research Focus
Capacity planning; Resource Management; Storage Systems; NVMe Flash Memory Devices; Distributed Data Processing Scheduling; Cloud Computing; Performance Evaluation; Workload Characterization; Simulation
About
Ningfang Mi is an Associate Professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. She received her Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary, Department of Computer Science in August 2009, under the guidance of Prof. Evgenia Smirni. She received her M.S in Computer Science from University of Texas at Dallas in 2004 and her B.S. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 2000. She was a recipient of 2015 NSF CAREER Award, 2014 AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) Award and 2010 IBM Faculty Award.
Education
- Ph.D. College of William and Mary, 2009
- M.S. University of Texas at Dallas, 2004
- B.S. Nanjing University, 2000
Honors & Awards
- 2015 The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award
- 2014 The Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) Award
- 2010 The IBM Faculty Award
- 2020 The Outstanding Student Paper Award at IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC)
- 2018 The Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD)
- 2017 The Best Paper Award at IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC)
Research Overview
Capacity planning; Resource Management; Storage Systems; NVMe Flash Memory Devices; Distributed Data Processing Scheduling; Cloud Computing; Performance Evaluation; Workload Characterization; Simulation
Computer Systems Research Laboratory
The Northeastern University Computer Systems Research Laboratory (NUCSRL) is a lab of the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, located on the Northeastern University Campus in the Dana Research Center Building. Students working in NUCSRL are from the Electrical Engineering or the Computer Engineering majors. This lab is under the direction of Professor Ningfang Mi. NUCSRL’s areas of research: Capacity Planning, Resource Management, Performance Evaluation, System Modeling and Simulation, Data Center, Cloud Computing, MapReduce / Hadoop Scheduling.
Selected Research Projects
- CAREER: Capacity Planning Methodologies for Large Clusters with Heterogeneous Architectures and Diverse Applications
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- NVMeOF Zoning Configuration and Adjustment for Ethernet-SSD Based Storage Environments
- – Principal Investigator, Samsung Semiconductor
- New Techniques for I/O Behavior Modeling and Persistent Storage Device Configuration
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Creating An Integrated Management Layer To Administer Heterogeneous Resources in Dynamic Workflow Clusters
- – Principal Investigator, Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Department Research Areas
Selected Publications
- J. Bhimani, A. Maruf, N. Mi, R. Pandurangan, and V. Balakrishnan, Auto-Tuning Parameters for Emerging Multi-Stream Flash-Based Storage Drives Through New I/O Pattern Generations , IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), 2020
- D. Jia, M. Bayati, R. Lee, and N. Mi, “RITA: Efficient Memory Allocation Scheme for Containerized Parallel Systems to Improve Data Processing Latency”, in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE CLOUD), Oct. 2020.
- J. Bhimani, N. Mi, M. Leeser, Z. Yang, New Performance Modeling Methods for Parallel Data Processing Applications, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), 2019
- Y. Yao, H. Gao, J. Wang, B. Sheng, N. Mi, New Scheduling Algorithms for Improving Performance and Resource Utilization in Hadoop YARN Clusters, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), 2019
- 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), 4(3), 2018, 313-326
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 […]