Interview with Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed

Featured Engineer

Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed

Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed - Assistant Professor, ECE; Mississippi State University

How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start?

I have been following IT news and development since high school and had my first PC in the senior year. As I continue to read more about new software and hardware systems, I realized their great potentials and how they will influence every aspect of our daily life in the near future. I have never been disappointed even with such high expectation. I continued to follow this trace since then and decided to be part of this exciting field and contribute to it both as a researcher as well as a teacher. So, I went to university and never left.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

I mostly use software tools at work but I recently start using Xilinx based FPGA boards and design tools. I found it extremely useful for testing and evaluating digital designs alternatives.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

MatLab and its toolboxes are essential to my research. I use it for system modeling, validation and analysis of design prototypes. Most of my programming lately has been in Java or Python and for that I like to use the Eclipse integrated developing environment.

What is on your bookshelf?

At office, I keep a variety of technical books including textbooks on computer organization and architecture (including distributed systems), digital design, programming languages (C++, python, Java), formal verifications, optimization and automatic control. The titles in my office bookshelf continue to change as technology changes and new topics emerge. At the moment, I am reviewing two titles, “Distributed Systems” and “Optimization Theory”. At home, I enjoy reading a variety of topics but most of my readings lately have been on history, philosophy, science, and international cuisines (I like cooking). I am currently reading, “the road to reality”, and “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Intuition, common sense, and basic system design and analysis principles.

What has been your favorite project?

I have been fortunate to work on many projects since my graduation. They all have been interesting in various ways and offered new learning experience for me. My recent favorite project is on developing model-based techniques for automatic fault adaptation and security management in enterprise distributed computing systems. This project aims to develop and validate a fault-adaptive control framework to manage computing systems operating in a data center setting. The main idea is to integrate control, diagnosis, and fault recovery processes within a common model-based framework which will continually optimize or tune system behavior in response to both changes within the system as well as to external changes user requests and operating settings.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I am working on three research projects. The first project addresses autonomic performance (quality of service) management of distributed computing systems. Such systems typically host a variety of critical commerce, transportation, and military applications, among others, and must satisfy stringent operation requirements. I am working to develop a control-based policy for managing the performance and resource requirements of a general class of computation systems operating in uncertain environment. Earlier similar control-based management structure has been developed for several practical systems including the fuel-tank system of an aircraft, the water recovery system in the NASA advanced life support system, and a communication signal detection and classification system. This work is part of the newly established center for autonomic computing at Mississippi State University (MSU) fostering long-term collaborative partnerships amongst industry, academia, and government.

The second project is about automated fault adaptive management of enterprise computing system and was described earlier. The third project aims to coordinate systems of multifunctional converters with the goal of achieving flexible management of energy flow throughout shipboard distribution systems. Coordination is achieved through multi-level distributed control architecture to regulate the energy distribution and address compensation problems in power electronic converters. The distributed implementation of the control structure is expected to be more scalable, easier to expand, and can help avoid single point of failure.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

The integration of system modeling, optimization, and automation techniques to develop future generation of self-managing computing systems. Automatic performance management has a great potential to improve the efficiency, reliability, cost effectiveness, and environmental impact of current and future large scale enterprise systems and services, including embedded, grid, and cloud computing.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

The design and implementation of next generation autonomic computing systems will require bringing together the system optimization, control theory, system diagnosis, fault tolerance security analysis, and distributed computing communities. It will also require a close interaction between academic institutes and computing industry in a way that maintains the interest from both sides in such collaboration on the long term.