News

March 30, 2006 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted Assistant Professor Scott Rixner a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work in the area of network server architecture.  The award of $400,000 over five years will allow Rixner to pursue the goals outlined in his proposal, entitled “Parallel, Scalable, and Efficient I/O for Network Servers.”

“The goal of this project is to develop new network subsystem hardware and software architectures by considering all levels of the system, including the operating system's network stack, network device drivers, the I/O system, and network interface hardware,” said Rixner.  “This will result in a fundamental restructuring of the hardware and software interfaces within the network subsystem of future computer systems, which is necessary to close the widening gap between the networking performance of traditional computer systems architectures and the ever increasing demand for network communication.”

Asst. Professor Scott Rixner

The NSF grants the CAREER award to junior faculty members to support their efforts in integrating research and education.  CAREER is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars.

“This award will enable my research group to continue to develop and evaluate key innovations for next-generation networked computer systems,” said Rixner.  “These innovations will be critical to the design of future parallel, scalable, and efficient network subsystems.”

Scott Rixner received his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His current research interests include media, network, and communications processing; the interaction between operating systems and computer architectures; and memory system architecture.  For more on Rixner’s work, please see his website < http://www.cs.rice.edu/~rixner/>.