Ali Butt

Ali Butt is a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering and ECE by courtesy. He serves as Associate Department Head for Faculty Development and directs the Distributed Systems & Storage Laboratory (DSSL) and the stack@cs Center for Computer Systems. His research focuses on cloud and high-performance computing systems, systems support for machine/deep learning, storage systems, and distributed systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University (2006).

He has received prestigious awards including the

• NSF CAREER Award (2008)
• IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2015)
• VT College of Engineering Dean's Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor (2009)
• NetApp Faculty Fellowships (2011, 2015)
• VT College of Engineering Faculty Fellow (2013)

His recent work explores federated learning optimizations, I/O load balancing in parallel file systems, and containerized HPC workflows. As Associate Editor for journals like IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and ACM Transactions on Storage, he contributes to advancing systems research. His leadership in the DSSL lab drives innovations in large-scale experimental computer systems and data-intensive computing.