# Xiaodong Zhang (computer scientist)

Xiaodong Zhang is a computer scientist and academic. He is an engineering professor at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on data management in memory, storage, and distributed systems. Zhang is also a founding member of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF) and a member of its board of directors.

## Early life and education

Born in Beijing, China, Zhang attended the Beijing University of Technology and received a bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1982. After working in the same university for about two years, He moved to the United States of America and went to The University of Colorado-Boulder. At the University of Colorado, Zhang studied computer science and received a master of science in 1985, followed by a PhD in 1989, supervised by Robert B. Schnabel.

## Career

In 1983, Zhang started to work as a research assistant in the COADS Project (now ICOADS) under the American scientist Ralph J. Slutz (1917-2005) until 1985. Later, in 2010, he endowed the Ralph J. Sultz Student Excellence Scholarship program in the computer science department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, offering annual awards to selected students.
Following his PhD in 1989, Zhang joined the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he served as an assistant professor and associate professor of computer science until 1997.
In 1997, Zhang joined the College of William and Mary, where he worked as the Lattie P. Evans Professor and the chairman of the computer science department until the end of 2005. During this time, he also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, where he was in charge of research grants in the field of high-performance computing from 2001 to 2003.
After serving at the College of William and Mary, Zhang joined Ohio State University in 2006 as a Robert M. Critchfield professor in engineering and the chairman of the computer science and engineering department. He served as the chairman of the computer science and engineering department at the Ohio State University until 2018.
As of 2024, Zhang has been serving as an engineering professor at the Ohio State University. In addition, he has been associated with the Asian American Scholar Forum as its founding member and member of its board of directors since 2022.

## Research and technology transfer

His research focuses primarily on data management in computer and distributed systems. With his students and collaborators, Zhang has published a list of papers on algorithms and their system implementations, which have been adopted in mainstream operating and database systems, as well as commercial processors, including SQL by Sun Microsystems, Fusion Drive by Apple, and GPP by Nvidia.
In 2000, with Zhao Zhang and Zhichun Zhu, his paper on a permutation-based page interleaving scheme influenced the interleaved memory design and has been adopted in several commercial processors, such as Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
In 2002, along with Song Jiang, his paper on the LIRS cache replacement algorithm addressed the fundamental issues in the LRU replacement algorithm and has been adopted in many data processing production systems.
In 2008, with a group of academic researchers, his paper on the management of Last-level Cache in multicore processors was adopted by Intel.
In 2011, with collaborators from both industries and academia, his paper on RCFile created a data storage format for large volumes of data processing that has been widely used in many applications.
In 2011, with Feng Chen and David Koufaty, his Hystor paper influenced the Apple hybrid storage product Fusion Drive.
In 2012, with a group of researchers both at Ohio State and Emory University Medical School, his paper on accelerating pathology image data processing was included in NVIDIA Developer Geometric Performance Primitative (GPP)
A major theme of his work involves designing algorithms and systems for practical applications running in production systems and contributing to the development of computer systems.

## Awards and honors

* Elected as an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to computer memory systems by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2009)
* Received Distinguished Engineering and Applied Science Alumni Award, University of Colorado at Boulder (2011)
* Elected as an ACM Fellow for his contributions to data and memory management in distributed systems by The Association for Computing Machinery (2012)
* Received Excellence in Education Leadership Award by Lutron Foundation (2018)
* Received Microarchitecture Test of Time Award by The Association for Computing Machinery (2020)
* Received the Distinguished Scholar Award from Ohio State University (2023)

## Selected works

* A permutation-based page interleaving scheme to reduce row-buffer conflicts and exploit locality; Z. Zhang, Z. Zhu, X Zhang; 2000
* LIRS: and efficient low inter-reference recency set replacement to improve buffere cache performance; S. Jiang and X Zhang; 2002
* Clock-Pro: an effective improvement of the Clock replacement; S. Jiang, F. Chen, X. Ding, X Zhang; 2005
* Gaining insights into multicore cache partitioning: bridging the gap between simulation and real systems; J. Lin, Q. Lu, X. Ding, Z. Zhang, X Zhang, P. Sadayappan; 2008
* Hystor: making the best usage of solid state drives in high performance storage systems; F. Chen, D. Koufaty, X Zhang; 2011
* YSmart: Yet another SQL-to-MapReduce Translator; R Lee, T. Luo, Y. Huai, F. Wang, Y. He, X Zhang; 2011
* Accelerating pathology image data cross-comparison on CPU-GPU hybrid systems; K. Wang, Y. Huai, R. Lee, F. Wang, X Zhang, J. Saltz; 2012
* Hadoop-GIS: a high performance spatial data ware housing system over MapReduce; A. Aji, F. Wang, H. Vo, R. Lee, Q. Liu, X. Zhang, J. Saltz; 2013
* LDPC-in-SSD: making advanced error correction codes work effectively in Solid State Drives; K. Zhao, W. Zhao, H. Sun, X Zhang, N. Zheng, T. Zhang; 2013
* Yin and Yang of processing data warehousing queries on GPU devices; Y. Yuan, R Lee, X Zhang; 2013
* Data Management: Interactions with Computer Architecture and Systems; Cambridge Press, X. Zhang, R. Lee, 2024