Prof. Ming Zhao directs the research laboratory for Virtualized Infrastructures, Systems, and Applications (VISA). His research is in the areas of experimental computer systems, including
distributed/cloud, big-data, and high-performance computing systems. He is also interested in the interdisciplinary studies that bridge computer systems research with other domains. His research has generated significant real-world impacts and been used by various production systems. His work on a cloud storage caching is now deployed at a leading European cloud company, CloudVPS, and adopted by many others (e.g., Facebook) to provide scalable cloud storage and benefit both cloud providers and users. He has collaborated with IBM on the performance virtualization of high-performance parallel storage systems. He has also received a VMware faculty award to work on the QoS issues of data-intensive computing systems.