Swapnil Patil, a PhD student in computer science, took first place in the graduate student category of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition Grand Finals.

Patil received the award June 4 at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose, Calif., for his development of a file system director service that scales to millions of files, which he presented at SC10, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Nurcan Durak of the University of Louisville and Xiangyu Dong of Penn State University received second- and third-place honors.

ACM's Student Research Program is sponsored by Microsoft Research to encourage students to pursue careers in computer science research, and to ensure the future of scientific discovery and innovation. The competitions, held at 13 major ACM Special Interest Group www.acm.org/sigsconferences within the last year, featured research projects produced by an international array of computer science graduate and undergraduate students. Winners from each of the SIG competitions were then eligible to compete in the Grand Finals.