Independent study finale

Written on 10:58 AM by Tushar

I had written a blog before regarding my independent study in I/O virtualization so thought of adding a finale.

To give you a background, I was talking to Prof. Randal Burns regarding doing some research in I/O virtualization in the beginning of Spring semester. Randal told me that I can work on any idea that I find interesting. By then I had already accepted VMware’s offer for the summer internship so I decided to talk to them to see if they had anything research-y that I could work on. My VMware manager and mentor were very approachable and as per their suggestion I decided to work on ‘Storage I/O load balancing algorithms’ as my independent study topic. Randal was fine with this idea. Till the end of spring semester I was still in the reading phase to figure out the depth and breadth of the problem. At JHU, if you start an independent study in Spring then you can extend it till the end of Oct if your adviser is fine with that. Till I joined VMware, I had no idea whether I will be working on the same stuff. Fortunately it turned out that it is going to be my summer internship project. I won’t go into details of what we achieved due to Intellectual Property issues but to sum up my experience I will say my internship was “any systems programmer’s dream job”. My talk at VMware on the same topic was also very well received.

After coming back to Hopkins I went to Randal to give him an update about my independent study work. I thought I will have to do some more work before writing the report. But I was surprised to see the outcome of the meeting!

R: “It must be a busy summer!”

R: “So did you work on $$$$$$ worth storage arrays?”

R: “So how do you plan to use this work?
Me: (worried)What do you mean?
R: “Do you want to use this as a masters thesis or a project?”
Me: (couldn't believe my ears!)“Do you think I can use this as a thesis?”
R: “Sure…(with some improvements,suggestions)”

R: "...As far as an independent study is concerned just submit the report and you're good to go..."

R: “If I were to review this paper for FAST…”

:)

In the words of my mentor, “Good to see that your independent study bird fell with this stone! “

So officially I just need two more courses to graduate!

Posted in grad life, vmware

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