Laying A Course for Crash Prevention
by A.J. Kleber
As the landscape of technological development today is largely defined by the infamous motto, “move fast and break things,” many users have experienced this “breakage” and its repercussions, as the complex systems that underpin so much of daily life are continually updated, expanded, and personalized. While this kind of pace may drive breakthroughs and bleeding-edge innovation, greater stability and consistent speed are essential to regular life, day-to-day operation, and critical functions. Enter researchers like the newest member of the BU ECE faculty, Assistant Professor Yigong Hu.
Professor Hu’s research interests are centered on building large-scale, cloud and mobile systems which are fast and reliable, and much of his work to date has focused on developing techniques to detect, diagnose, and mitigate performance issues which spring from increased complexity and concurrency (put simply: multiple processes running simultaneously and drawing from the same resources, such as when your device freezes from trying to run too many memory-hungry apps at once).
How to achieve such desirable results? Hu’s past approaches have included pre-emptive analysis of a system’s whole configuration to identify performance problems before they happen and model solutions, and to enhance the “communication” between an operating system (OS) and a resource-hungry app, allowing for coordination which can alleviate the impact of the app’s processes on the performance of the system or device as a whole. And he’s just getting started.
Yigong Hu joins Boston University from a post-doctoral research position at the University of Washington. His work has been published in venues such as the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), EuroSys, and the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS); he received the Best Paper Award at ASPLOS 2019. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2023. Hu begins his teaching career at BU with EC 440: Introduction to Operating Systems, in Fall 2025.