I am currently (as of 2011) a third-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame.

Work Address:  


 222 Cushing Hall
Unversity of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556 		       Office Phone:   (574)-631-8854
Email:   lyu2 at nd dot edu

I received my Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science in 2006 and 2008 respectively at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Right after that I joined the Cooperative Computing Lab at the University of Notre Dame as a Ph.D. student. My advisor is Dr. Douglas Thain.

Research

My research interest is developing fast and robust systems for non-expert users who need the power of distributed systems. Distributed systems such as clusters, clouds, and grids are very challenging programming environments. It might be possible for expert programmers to tune these systems and achieve desirable performance; however, this is usually not true for normal users.

My research group argues that high level abstractions are an effective way to allow normal users to harness parallel computing. An abstraction is a regularly structured framework that allows users to plug in simple sequential programs and create very large parallel programs with minimum effort. A commonly recognized example of abstractions is Google's Map-Reduce. We have developed some other abstractions, such as All-Pairs, Wavefront and Makeflow. These abstractions have been used to accelerate actual scientfic researches in bioinformatics, biometrics, data mining, economics, etc.

Publications

Talks & Posters