Xian-He Sun, chair and professor of the Computer Science Department, has been awarded the title of distinguished professor for exceptional achievement in his field. The title of distinguished professor is the highest award that IIT gives to faculty members, accorded to full-time professors who have achieved preeminence in their field based on their scholarly work and the excellence of their teaching.
Sun is a well regarded, prolific researcher with interests in parallel and high-end computing, big data processing, and software systems. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other U.S. government agencies. He is the director of the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) laboratory at IIT and a guest faculty in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Among other things, he co-developed Sun-Ni’s Law, one of three scalable computing laws along with Amdahl’s law and Gustafson’s law, and Concurrent Average Memory Access Time (C-AMAT), a mathematical model to address the memory-wall problem. In 2012, Sun was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow for his contributions to memory-bounded performance metrics and scalable parallel computing. He is a Senior Member of the Association for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
He has published more than 200 refereed journal articles, conference papers, books, book chapters and other publications and has three U.S. patents and one Chinese patent. His group received the ACM/IEEE HPC award and the NSF V-Tech HEC Challenge award in 2006, 2007, and 2008 for its contributions to data access optimization and fault-tolerant. He has been an editor of eight international professional journals, including IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems.
Among many awards and honors, he is a Tan Chin Tuan Fellow, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a guest professor, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, P.R. China. He is a former president of the Society of Chinese-American Professors and Scientists.
In 2012, he was selected by the China Association for Science and Technology to be a representative to its national congress. Sun has graduated nine Ph.D. students and currently has five Ph.D. students.
This spring, Sun is the general co-chair, along with Ian Foster of the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, of IEEE/ACM Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing 2014, to take place in May in Chicago.
Sun joined IIT in 1999 from Louisiana State University – Baton Rouge, where he was an associate professor and the founding director of the Scalable Computing Software laboratory. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ames National Laboratory, a staff scientist at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA Langley Research Center, and an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) fellow at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratories. He received his B.S. in mathematics in 1982 from Beijing Normal University, P.R. China, and his M.S. in Mathematics, and M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science in 1985, 1987, and 1990, respectively, all from Michigan State University.