DGIST's Jinhyung Koo Selected as 'Google PhD Fellow'... Developed Software with Performance Tens of Times Better

Jinhyung Koo, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST (President Kook Yang), was selected as a 2023 Google PhD Fellow.

Affiliated with Professor Seongjin Lee's team at DGIST, Koo was the only fellow selected from Asian universities in the systems and networking field for his research on improving the efficiency of data storage software using the latest storage devices.

With the advent of the big data era, enormous resources and costs are consumed to store vast amounts of data both online and offline on computer servers, network equipment, and storage devices. However, existing storage software is optimized for slower storage devices like hard disks, resulting in very low efficiency in terms of performance, capacity, and power consumption. In contrast, the latest storage devices such as SSDs (Solid State Drives) offer higher performance and capacity compared to traditional hard disks, can perform complex computations within the device, and provide greater efficiency in performance, capacity, and power consumption.

Jinhyung Gu (left), a PhD student at DGIST, and Professor Seongjin Lee from the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering.

Professor Seongjin Lee's team conducted research to address various issues found in other storage software by utilizing SSDs. They developed new software that eliminates or significantly improves data bottlenecks in existing systems, achieving storage performance and power efficiency up to several tens of times higher than before.

Through this research, numerous papers on essential components of storage systems such as caching systems, file systems, and distributed systems were published in top international conferences in the computer systems field, including EuroSys (2023), OSDI (2021), and ASPLOS (2019), recognizing the excellence of the work.

Koo Jinhyung said, “I am honored to receive positive recognition for the research I have conducted so far. I believe this achievement is thanks to DGIST, which has supported me to focus on research in an excellent environment, my advisor who has always been close and helpful, and my lab colleagues. I will continue to devote myself to developing efficient storage software technologies in the future.”

Professor Seongjin Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST, who supervises doctoral student Koo Jinhyung, said, “Jinhyung Koo is not only an outstanding researcher but also a person of excellent character, and I expect him to grow into a leading talent in computer systems research.”

Professor Kyungjoon Park, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at DGIST, said, “The Google PhD Fellowship is a program that selects graduate students with world-class research capabilities in computer science. Koo Jinhyung’s selection as a fellow demonstrates that DGIST’s computer science research level has reached the top tier globally.”

The Google PhD Fellowship is a program that supports promising talents active in research fields within computer science for graduate students. This year, 67 fellows were selected worldwide, including five from South Korea. Notably, in the systems and networking field, Jinhyung Koo from DGIST was the only fellow selected from Asian universities.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.