His research interests lie in the broad area of operating systems, distributed and parallel computing, and machine learning. His research focuses on improving the quality-of-service (QoS) of multi-tenant systems, including cloud systems and BigData analytics. The overarching goals are to guarantee fairness and service differentiation between users while achieving high hardware efficiency and delivering predictable performance. His research blends systematic profiling, statistical modeling, hardware-software interaction and cross-layer coordination to identify fundamental challenges as well as limitations of existing systems, and to develop simple but elegant solutions. Dr. Rao’s research has led to the winning of two NSF CNS core research projects and four Best Paper award/nominations in the prestigious conferences, including HPCA, HPDC, APSys, and ICAC.