CSC News

Ning Receives Renewal of IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award

Dr. Peng Ning, associate professor of computer science at NC State University, has been selected to receive a 2010 IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award valued at $100,000.

This award is a renewal of Ning’s 2009 IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award in the same amount.

This highly competitive award recognizes the quality of Dr. Ning’s program, and its importance to the industry.  It is a gift in recognition of his achievement and support for open collaborative research.

The title of his proposal is “Secure Virtual Machine Image Repository.”  Dr. Ning’s principal IBM collaborator is Dr. Xiaolan Zhang, with other IBM collaborators in the Mirage Team at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Brief Description of the project and its goals:  Virtual Machine (VM) image is a convenient mechanism to encapsulate a complete software stack. It is a fundamental technological enabler for building more elaborate computing services such as a computing cloud.  Increasingly, image format and its associated management libraries are shaping how software are distributed and managed in a cloud computing environment, which in turn drives the affinity of software vendors towards certain clouds. For example, recently Oracle announced that its database products can be downloaded as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) image in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

We believe that a closed VM image format, such as the AMI, inhibits competition and innovation, and we propose an open VM image repository that is image-format agnostic.  Any VM image whose format is publicly documented can be published and retrieved from the repository. We hope to build a large community around such a repository that together drives the innovation in the VM image management area.  Sharing VM images at a large scale raises many security challenges.  This project aims to develop novel mechanisms to protect VM images that are both efficient and scalable.

IBM is a valued Super ePartner with the department and is actively collaborating with our faculty and students on numerous programs and initiatives.  NC State University is one of IBM’s top suppliers of new graduate talent, worldwide.

For more information on Dr. Ning, click here.

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