□ Jin-hyung Koo, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST; President Young Kuk), has been selected as a 2023 Google PhD Fellow. Koo, a member of Professor Sung-jin Lee's team at DGIST, was the only fellow selected in the field of systems and networks, among all the Asian universities, for his research on improving the efficiency of data storage software using the latest storage devices.
□ With the arrival of the big data era, a massive amount of resources, including money, is being expended on computer servers, network equipment, and storage devices to store a large volume of data online and offline. However, traditional storage software is optimized to be used with slow storage devices, such as hard disk drives (HDDs), resulting in very low performance efficiency, storage capacity, and power. The latest storage devices, such as solid-state drives (SSDs), offer better performance and storage capacity than traditional HDDs. Additionally, such devices perform complex internal calculations and offer higher efficiency than HDDs in terms of performance, storage capacity, and strategy.
□ Professor Sung-jin Lee's team at DGIST conducted research to overcome problems posed by older storage software programs in relation to SSDs and successfully developed a new software program that can eliminate or greatly improve data bottlenecks in traditional systems to achieve storage performance and power efficiency tens of times higher than conventional ones.
□ The research resulted in multiple published papers on caching systems, file systems, and distributed systems, which are essential in storage systems. The papers have been published as part of top international conferences in the computer systems field, such as EuroSys (2023), OSDI (2021), and ASPLOS (2019). Furthermore, the literature has been recognized for excellence.
□ Jin-hyung Koo, a PhD student at DGIST, said, "I have been positively evaluated for my research so far, which I attribute to DGIST, which has supported me to focus on research in an outstanding environment, my advisor professor, who has always helped me, and my research colleagues. I will remain committed to researching and developing efficient storage software technology in the future."
□ Koo's PhD program advisor, Professor Sung-jin Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, remarked, "Koo is a talented researcher who not only has research skills but also has a great character, and I expect him to grow into a computer systems researcher in the future."
□ Kyung-joon Park, dean of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST, commented, "The Google PhD Fellowship selects graduate students with the world’s best research competences in the field of computer sciences, and Koo’s fellowship demonstrates that research in computer sciences at DGIST has reached the world-class level."
□ The Google PhD Fellowship program is designed to support talented graduate students in promising computer sciences research areas. This year, 67 students from around the world, including five from Korea, were selected. Notably, DGIST’s Koo was the only student among all the Asian universities to be selected in the field of systems and networks.
