STE||AR Spotlight: Alireza Kheirkhahan

Alireza Kheirkhahan is an IT Consultant in the STE||AR Group at LSU.  He received his B.S in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran and his master’s in computer science from LSU.

Alireza’s master thesis focused on I/O backend and Storage solutions. His main research focus is High Performance Computing, I/O Systems, high-throughput, redundant and distributed storage systems

Alireza designed and implemented STE||AR Group at LSU’s small research cluster, Rostam. Since 2015, he manages and improves this cluster. Currently, the second generation of the computer cluster is in use, and the next generation is in design. Rostam consists of nearly 80 compute nodes and multiple storage servers. Over the course of the years, more than a dozen graduate students used Rostam for their thesis work, and more than thirty scientific publications have been created using this cluster.

On the CERA (Coastal Emergency Risk Assessment) project, Alireza acts as residing high performance specialist. He carries the specific hpc tasks for domain scientists.  He adapts and maintains their computational needs in HPC clusters provided by LSU and the State of Louisiana. 

Alireza designed and implemented a special purpose storage system for CERA projects. CERA has a particular need for a specific storage solution. The application creates bursts of gigabytes of data at once and goes quite for few hours until another burst arrives. The recently generated data is highly valued and must have very quick and reliable access, but the older data must be archived with a cost-effective manner. With his research background, Alireza designed the new storage system to carry out both tasks at once, which reduced the data transfer time significantly and increased reliability.

Alireza lives in Baton Rouge, with his wife Shahrzad and son Damon. In his spare time, he enjoys woodworking and tinkering with electronics. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *