Xiaodong Zhang (computer scientist)

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Xiaodong Zhang
Alma mater Beijing University of Technology (BS)
University of Colorado Boulder (MS, PhD)
Known for Interleaved memory
LIRS and other caching methods
RCFile and big data systems
Hardware acceleration
Awards IEEE Fellow (2009)
Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Colorado Boulder (2011)
ACM Fellow (2012)
ACM Microarchitecture Test of Time Award (2020)
VLDB Endowment Test of Time Award (2024)
IEEE Data Engineering Impact Award (2025)
Scientific career
Fields Data management
Memory systems
Storage systems
High-performance computing
Institutions University of Texas at San Antonio
Rice University
College of William & Mary
National Science Foundation
The Ohio State University
Doctoral advisor Robert B. Schnabel
Other academic advisors Ralph J. Slutz

Xiaodong Zhang is a computer scientist and academic. He is a University Distinguished Scholar and Robert M. Critchfield Professor in Engineering [1] [2] at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on data management in computer memory, storage, and distributed systems. Zhang is also a founding member of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF) and a member of its board of directors. [1] [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Zhang was born in Beijing to Zhang Min, a Supreme Court judge, and Jiang Yishan, a university professor. Both parents were graduates of Wuhan University. In 2016, Zhang helped establish the Zhang Min and Jiang Yishan Law Education Endowment Fund at the university’s Law School [4] , which has since provided annual scholarships to students.

Zhang attended the Beijing University of Technology and received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1982. After working in the same university for about two years, He moved to the United States of America and went to University of Colorado Boulder, where he studied computer science and received a Master of Science in 1985, followed by a PhD in 1989, supervised by Robert B. Schnabel.

Career

In 1983, Zhang started to work as a research assistant in the COADS Project (now ICOADS) under physicist and computer architect Ralph J. Slutz (1917–2005), and completed his Master thesis in 1985. Later, in 2010, he endowed the Ralph J. Sultz Student Excellence Scholarship program in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, offering annual awards to selected students. [3]

Following his PhD in 1989, Zhang joined the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he served as an assistant professor and associate professor of computer science until 1997. [5] He was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice University in Houston, Texas, from summer to the end of 1990. His visit was hosted by John E. Dennis for a research collaboration.

In 1997, Zhang joined the College of William and Mary, where he worked as the Lattie P. Evans Professor and the Chairman of the Computer Science Department until the end of 2005. During this time, he also served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, where he was in charge of evaluation and recommendation of research proposals for grants in the field of high-performance computing from 2001 to 2003.

After serving at the College of William and Mary, Zhang joined Ohio State University in 2006 as the Robert M. Critchfield Professor in Engineering and the Chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. He served the department chair at the Ohio State University until 2018. [5]

Research advancement and technology impact  

His research focuses primarily on data management in computer and distributed systems. With his students and collaborators, Zhang has published a list of papers on algorithms and their system implementations, which have been adopted in mainstream operating and database systems, as well as commercial processors, including Sun Microsystems, MySQL, BSD operating system, Fusion Drive by Apple, Geometric Performance Primitives (GPP) by Nvidia and others.

A major theme of his work involves designing algorithms and systems for practical applications running in production systems and contributing to the development of computer systems.

Awards and honors

Selected works

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Xiaodong Zhang receives 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award". Computer Science and Engineering. 2023-03-21. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  2. "Zhang, Xiaodong". Computer Science and Engineering. 2020-08-11. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  3. 1 2 "Student Awards | Computer Science | University of Colorado Boulder". www.colorado.edu. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  4. "Zhang Min and Jiang Yishan Law Education Endowment Fund". Wuhan University. Retrieved 22 August 2025.
  5. 1 2 3 anonymous (2018-05-15). "Xiaodong Zhang received Joel and Ruth Spira Award for Excellence in Education Leadership by the Lutron Foundation". Computer Science and Engineering. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  6. 1 2 "Test of Time Award". ACM SIGMICRO. Retrieved April 23, 2025.
  7. 1 2 "Professor Xiaodong Zhang Receives 2020 ACM Microarchitecture Test of Time Award". Computer Science and Engineering, Ohio State University. January 2021. Retrieved April 23, 2025.
  8. Jaleel, Aamer; Theobald, Kevin B.; Steely, Simon C.; Emer, Joel (2010). High performance cache replacement using re-reference interval prediction (RRIP) . Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '10). Saint-Malo, France: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 60–71. doi:10.1145/1815961.1815971. ISBN   9781450300537.
  9. "OS-cache-software_intel_2010" (PDF). 2010. Retrieved 2025-04-25.
  10. "Apache Hive : Correlation Optimizer" . Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  11. "NVIDIA Developer" . Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  12. 1 2 "VLDB Test of Time Award" . Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  13. 1 2 "CSE Researchers Honored with the 2024 VLDB Endowment Test of Time Award" . Retrieved 2025-04-27.
  14. "IEEE Fellows Directory". www.ieee.org. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  15. "Xiaodong Zhang (MCompSci'85, Phd'89) | College of Engineering & Applied Science | University of Colorado Boulder". www.colorado.edu. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  16. "Xiaodong Zhang". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2025-03-17.
  17. "TCDE Award Recipients" . Retrieved 2025-05-01.
  18. "Xiaodong Zhang receives IEEE Data Engineering Impact Award" . Retrieved 2025-05-01.