This is the second in a series of blogs about Hewlett Packard Labs interns. They discuss what they learned and how their experience set the course for their future.
“Your career choice is important, and it’s crucial to be able to experiment and try new things,” the University of California Riverside doctoral student said. “After talking with some friends in research, I found the flexibility I wanted in the research world.”
Qi, now in his fifth year at UC Riverside’s computer science Ph.D. program, welcomed the chance to intern at Hewlett Packard Labs. He is working on reducing stress on overworked CPUs in serverless computing.
Prior to his Labs internship, Qi interned at Intel, working on 5G security projects that focus on how to enhance privacy preservation in 5G systems. He also started his research experience in serverless computing while working as a graduate research assistant at UC Riverside. In this role, he worked on the project to improve the dataplane design of function chains in serverless computing, reduce transmission latency, and make CPU resource usage more efficient. This work focused primarily on innovative software-based methodology, as opposed to hardware, which he would later work on at Labs.
His advisor at UC Riverside, Prof. K.K. Ramakrishnan, had long collaborated with Hewlett Packard Labs Networking and Distributed Systems Lab Director, Dr. Puneet Sharma. Prof. Ramakrishnan saw an opportunity for Qi to further his research with Dr. Sharma’s serverless computing team. Dr. Sharma needed a researcher to help with one of his projects he had in mind – looking at ways to offload processing to Data Processing Units (DPUs) or Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) to ease the burden on CPUs. DPUs and SmartNICs are considered to empower the promise of future data center networks, including improved network performance as well as reduced power consumption for network-related tasks. DPU/SmartNIC offloads have gained significant attention from industry vendors and cloud service providers, such as Nvidia, Intel and VMware.
Exploring a new field
Qi joined the team in the summer of 2022, working alongside Labs Research Scientist Dr. Diman Zad Tootaghaj. Using hardware accelerators on SmartNICs to transmit data using underutilized processing power was a new field for Qi, so he dug in to understand the main differences.
“Before I started, I hadn’t been involved in DPU research, and I had to learn from scratch,” said Qi. “I’d never worked with hardware accelerators before, but working on Puneet’s team, I learned this field is a great match for me.”
Qi’s experience working with serverless computing provided a valuable resource. He learned from the team about ways to leverage DPU processing capabilities in conjunction with CPUs to see whether overall improvements in data processing performance could be achieved. The interdisciplinary environment of the lab has also been a great help in exploring his projects.
“There are a lot of talented interns with diverse backgrounds. Although we worked on different projects, we often sit together (e.g., during lunch time) to share our progress and exchange ideas. I personally learn a lot from them. It helps me to get new ideas in my projects,” said Qi.
The scope of this project was large enough for Labs to extend his internship, allowing Qi to keep making progress on the research work he started. His internship proved to be formative for Qi, who is now taking a new technology domain he learned and is stitching his internship research work at Labs to his doctoral thesis. Additionally, his internship opened him up to the research world, a career he wants to actively pursue.
“I have a lot of friends in the research industry, and they helped me see how desirable that field is,” Qi said. “If you really like engineering, you should pursue that field, but research lets you tackle challenges in technology areas you actually want to work on.”
Aligning with career goals
For prospective interns, Qi emphasizes the importance of understanding what you’re passionate about and choosing an internship that aligns with that passion. Selecting an internship can be difficult, but Qi believes that taking the time to learn about your area of interest allows you to invest in an internship that best aligns with your future career goals.
“Finding this internship and talking to my network helped me realize that this job was perfect for my personality and nature,” Qi said. “Research is where I want to be. It has been a pleasure to work with a group of talented people on some interesting research problems. The lab's inclusive and flexible work culture is also something I aspire to. Instead of being driven by customer needs, like you see in most tech companies, working in the lab gives me the opportunity to really work on something that I’m passionate about. We, including the student interns and our mentors, work closely with each other as a true team. I believe this is the key element of successful research.”
When he completes his Ph.D., Qi plans to stay on the R&D side of product development, an area of interest that his internship at Labs helped him find.
Want to see if your skills can open up new worlds of research and postdoctoral opportunities for you? View Labs’ research opportunities here.
