Rashmi Vinayak, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, has won a five-year, $650,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for young faculty members.

The award will support Vinayak's work to improve the resource and energy efficiency of large-scale data centers, which together serve as the backbone for internet-based services, cloud services and data analytics platforms.

"Such large-scale systems are prone to failures and unavailability, and therefore have a high degree of redundancy built in to them to provide resilience against such events," she noted. "While redundancy provides resilience, it comes with a significant overhead in terms of resource and energy requirements. The overarching goal of this project is to design resource- and energy-efficient redundancy algorithms for data centers using tools based on information theory and coding theory."

Vinayak earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also worked as a postdoctoral researcher before joining CSD in 2017. Her previous awards include the Eli Jury Award from Berkeley's EECS Department, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Communications and Networking Research Award, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Memorial Lecture Award.