Computer science undergrad demonstrates research opportunities at Rice are virtually there for the asking

Computer science undergrad demonstrates research opportunities at Rice are virtually there for the asking
Junior, lead author Diego Ongaro to present at upcoming international computing conference 

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Special to the Rice News 

Like most prospective
Rice students, Diego Ongaro had plenty of options when it came to
selecting a college. He had it narrowed down to Rice and The University
of Texas-Austin, where he would be in an honors program for select
computer science majors. But what appealed to him about Rice was its
size.

“Even if you’re in a small honors program, on a 60,000-person campus I don’t know what the chances are that you’re going to really be unique or get a research opportunity after your first year,” he said.

DIEGO ONGARO

But at Rice, that’s exactly what he did. In
the summer after his first year, the computer science major not only
got the chance to participate in his professors’ research, but he also
became the lead author on the resulting research paper and will be
presenting that paper at the upcoming International Conference on
Virtual Execution Environments in Seattle.

”Diego’s a great example of what potential
stars can do here at Rice as undergraduates,” said Associate Professor
of Computer Science Alan Cox, who co-authored the paper with Ongaro and
Scott Rixner, also an associate professor of computer science. Cox said
while it’s not unusual for Rice undergraduates to participate in
research, it is quite an accomplishment for such a student to do what
Ongaro did: perform the lion’s share of the research, be the only
student-author on the research paper and present it at a conference of
scholars, researchers and industry experts from around the globe.

The opportunity was completely unexpected by
Ongaro, who would often stay after his introductory programming class
taught by Cox to ask questions and discuss related topics. A standout
student in the class, Ongaro struck Cox as a good candidate for an
internship working on his and Rixner’s research on virtualization, a
hot technology wherein one computer appears to function as many. The
technology that allows one to do more with less has been garnering
tremendous attention, due to its promise of increasing
computing-resource utilization while reducing computing costs, power
consumption, data-center space requirements and more.

”It was a little bit of a surprise to me when
Alan sent an e-mail offering me a research opportunity,” Ongaro
said. ”And one day in May, I showed up, was handed a computer and told
to go for it.”

The problem Cox and Rixner pointed Ongaro
toward was one of improving the network performance of applications
running in a virtualized environment. The professors had observed that
in a machine trying to support multiple applications at the same time,
applications that were not only computing data but also communicating
data would perform very poorly and unpredictably. Ongaro set about
designing a series of experiments to isolate what was causing this
behavior. He then conducted the experiments, analyzed the results and
presented his findings to Cox and Rixner. The professors suggested
several possible optimizations in light of the results, which Ongaro
then implemented and evaluated.

”I didn’t really know what they’d have me
doing,” Ongaro said. ”I didn’t think I’d be doing anything interesting
when I agreed to it; I thought I’d be running some tests. If you
compare it to a lab, I thought I’d be the one cleaning up the supplies
and putting stuff away.”

But it was so much more.

”He did it all himself,” Cox said. ”We pointed him in the right
direction, met with him on a regular basis to talk with him about the
progress he was making, and then we figured out how to shape it into a
paper.”

Ongaro will be presenting that paper, ”Scheduling I/O in Virtual
Machine Monitors,” at the International Conference on Virtual Execution
Environments in March. He admits the prospect is a bit intimidating