Professor Samer Al-Kiswany, one of two researchers at the University of Waterloo among 186 recipients nationally, received $50k in funding through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund.
The JELF program provides investigators with foundational infrastructure support to expand their research programs. The Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science and Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities, made the funding announcement today in Victoria, British Columbia.
“Congratulations to all of today’s recipients who will now have access to state-of-the-art tools and research infrastructure that will allow them to explore some of our most pressing questions,” Kirsty Duncan said. “The answers they find contribute to the evidence our government needs to build a stronger economy and a more prosperous future for all Canadians.”
Data storage systems are key components in data centres that hold the ever-increasing volumes of business, personal and social data, Al-Kiswany explained. “Historically, data storage systems have been the slowest and least efficient component in this infrastructure. With JELF support, I plan to investigate three radical design paradigms to improve storage system performance, efficiency and scalability.”
“This crucial infrastructure support will allow Samer and his graduate students to conduct leading-edge research to improve the speed of cloud-based storage systems,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “Their research will bring benefits to Canadian companies that build products in this domain, but it also has potential to have a wide influence on large-scale systems research and development.”
Al-Kiswany’s $50k JELF award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation will be matched provincially by a $50k Ontario Research Fund – Research infrastructure (ORF-RI) award, bringing total infrastructure support to $100k.
