UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Electrical engineer Viveck Cadambe has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his proposal “An Information Theoretic Perspective of Consistent Distributed Storage Systems.”
The highly distinguished NSF CAREER Award supports junior faculty who conduct innovative research, have shown excellence in teaching, and are able to successfully integrate the two. The award provides five years of financial support.
Cadambe, an assistant professor of electrical engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Penn State, will receive about $500,000 — funding that will be used to undertake a formal study to build reliable key-value storage. The project has the long-term potential to aid the development of new data storage techniques that can benefit key-value store implementations by reducing their storage cost and energy consumption.
“I think the support is quite generous; it will allow me to make a lot of progress in understanding the answers to many interesting research questions,” said Cadambe.
Cadambe will develop and study several new information theoretic formulations inspired by distributed systems theory and practice. The proposed formulations naturally expose trade-offs between the degrees of redundancy and consistency, and other physical parameters of storage systems. The project is likely to use tools from algebra, combinatorics and network information theory.
“The NSF award is a recognition of the promise of my research directions by a panel of members in the research community,” said Cadambe.
Cadambe joined the Department of Electrical Engineering in August 2014. Prior to coming to Penn State, he was a postdoc in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a doctorate from the University of California, Irvine in 2011.
His research involves understanding data storage and communication, mainly using the tools of information theory and coding theory. His interests include applications to wireless communication networks, distributed storage systems such as data centers, and to distributed computing.