Takahiro Hirofuchi Senior Researcher of AIST

CV

Takahiro Hirofuchi, Ph.D. is a senior researcher of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Currently, he is the team leader of Computing Continuum Infrastructure Research Team of Digital Architecture Research Center (DigiARC).

From the Cloud to Edge and Devices, our team is working hardware technologies and system software technologies supporting Continuum Computing. While the Cloud requires throughput-oriented technologies, the Edge requires latency-oriented technologies. We tackle research issues on throughput improvement, real-time assurance and energy saving, through an interdisciplinary approach to hardware and software co-design. For hardware and software co-design, our research is based on emerging semiconductor technologies and photonics technologies, in collaboration with the Department of Electronics and Manufacturing at AIST, and different universities and research institutes.

Having that in mind, for example, I have commenced the interdisciplinary research project of Error Permissive Computing, which aims at massively energy-efficient computing systems by redesigning hardware and software technologies. I am serving as the principal investigator of JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A).

I received the best paper award in ACM SoCC 2016 and the Yamashita SIG Research Award of Information Processing Society of Japan in 2014. I obtained a Ph.D. of engineering in 2007 at the Graduate School of Information Science of Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST). I obtained the BS of Geophysics at Faculty of Science in Kyoto University in 2002. I am an expert of system software technologies, especially operating system and hypervisor. My research interests also cover computer architecture, FPGA and network technologies.

Recent Selected Publications

  • RAMinate: Hypervisor-based Virtualization for Hybrid Main Memory Systems,
    Takahiro Hirofuchi, Ryousei Takano,
    Proceedings of the seventh ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC2016), pp.112-125, Oct 2016
    Best Paper Award,
    DOI: 10.1145/2987550.2987570
    More info (GitHub)

  • SimGrid VM: Virtual Machine Support for a Simulation Framework of Distributed Systems,
    Takahiro Hirofuchi, Adrien Lebre, Laurent Pouilloux,
    IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, pp.1-14, IEEE, Sep 2015
    DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2015.2481422
    PDF (Full Text)

Other publications are here.

Professional Experience

2021.04 -

Team Leader, Computing Continuum Infrastructure Research Team of Digital Architecture Research Center (DigiARC), AIST

2020.04 - 2022.03

Deputy Director (until 2021.06), Director (since 2021.07),
AIST-Tokyo Tech Real World Big-Data Computation Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL)

  • The joint laboratory of AIST and TITECH

2019.04 - 2021.03

Part-time lecturer, University of Tsukuba

  • Data science

2017.04 - 2018.03

Planning officer, Research Planning Office, Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, AIST

  • Strategic planning and administration of the department

2015.04 - Present

Tenured senior researcher, AIST

  • Non-volatile memory devices and approximate computing
  • IMPULSE (Initiative for most power-efficient ultra-large-scale data exploration) Project
  • VICTORIES (Vertically integrated center for technologies of optical routing toward ideal energy saving) Project

Key achievements:

  • Hypervisor for hybrid main memory systems (RAMinate)
  • Software-based NVM emulator supporting read/write asymmetric latencies (MESMERIC)
  • FPGA-based main memory emulator (METICULOUS)
  • DPDK-based network emulator (DEMU)

2013.01 - 2013.12

Invited research scientist of ASCOLA Research Group, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France

  • In cooperation with CNSR SONGS Project

Key achievements:

  • The virtual machine support of SimGrid (SimGrid VM)
  • A software tool to measure the memory update speed of a VM (Qemu-DPT)

2012.02 - 2012.03

Visiting researcher of ACIS Lab, University of Florida, USA

  • In cooperation with the Japan-US joint research fund (J-RAPID)

Key achievements:

  • Investigation on the impact of earthquakes on IT infrastructure
  • Disaster mitigation techniques enabled by virtualization technology
  • Automatic session control for rapid virtual cluster evacuation over WAN

2010.04 - 2015.03

Tenure-track researcher, AIST (Tenure-track senior researcher since 2013)

  • Main contributor to the ITRI part of JST CREST-ULP (Ultra Low Power) Program
  • PI of the international joint research project with ACIS Lab with University of Florida (J-RAPID)

Key achievements:

  • The production-level code of postcopy live migration Qemu/KVM (Yabusame)
  • A guest-OS-transparent Mobile IPv6 tunneling mechanism (Kagemusha)
  • A energy-efficient datacenter management system using postcopy live migration (GriVon)
  • A wide-area live migration system using active pre-caching and postcopy techniques (xNBD-WAN)
  • Supervisor of Ph.D. students of University of Tokyo as an expert of virtual machine technology

2008.04 - 2010.03

Post-doctoral researcher of ITRI, AIST

  • Mainly dedicated to JST CREST-ULP (Ultra Low Power) Program

Key achievements:

  • A hypervisor-independent live storage migration mechanism (xNBD)
  • A postcopy live migration for Qemu/KVM (Yabusame)

2008.02 - 2008.03

Visiting researcher of San Diego Super Computing Center, University of California, San Diego, USA

  • In cooperation with Rocks Cluster Distribution Project

Key achievements:

  • A virtual machine support for a cluster management system (VMware Roll for Rocks)
  • Contributions to Rocks development (bug fixes)

2007.04 - 2008.03

Post-doctoral researcher of Grid Technology Research Center, AIST

  • Contributions to AIST-SOA Project

Key achievements:

  • A virtual cluster management system in the AIST-SOA framework (GriVon)

Research Funds (PI)

Principal Investigator of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Type A)
A Study on Massively Energy-Efficient Memory Systems by Accepting Bit Flips (tentative translation) Period: April 2019 - March 2023 (4 years)
Budget: 45,110,000 Yen
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ja/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-19H01108/

Principal Investigator of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Type C)
A Study on Non-volatile Memory Emulation
Period: April 2016 - March 2019 (3 years)
Budget: 4,550,000 Yen
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-16K00115/

Principal Investigator of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Type C)
A Study on Fast Wide-area Live Migration Techniques for Disaster Recovery
Period: April 2013 - March 2016 (3 years)
Budget: 2,990,000 Yen
http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/d/p/25330097.en.html

Principal Investigator of Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Type B)
A Study on Wide-area Migration of Large-Scale Virtual Machine Clusters
Period: April 2011 - March 2013 (2 years)
Budget: 1,950,000 Yen
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ja/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-23700048/

Principal Investigator of Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Type B)
A Study on Live Migration over Wide Area Network
Period: April 2008 - March 2011 (3 years)
Budget: 3,640,000 Yen
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ja/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-20700038/

Principal Investigator of Grants for Rapid Response Research, i.e., Urgent funding for international collaborative research that arises from earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear accidents (J-RAPID)
IT Virtualization for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery
In cooperation with ACIS Lab of University Florida (The PI of the US counterpart is Dr. Mauricio Tsugawa.)
Period: April 2011 - March 2013 (2 years)
Budget: 2,950,000 Yen + 50,000 USD

Awards

October 2016
The Best Paper Award in ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2016.

January 2015
The Best Poster Award in Annual Meeting on Advanced Computing System and Infrastructure (ACSI) 2015.

March 2014
The Yamashita SIG Research Award by Information Processing Society of Japan.

November 2012
The Best Paper Award in Computer System Symposium 2012 organized by Information Processing Society of Japan.

November 2011
The Best Paper Award in Computer System Symposium 2011 organized by Information Processing Society of Japan.

June 2010
The Best Demonstration Award in the 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid2010).

November 2009
The Best Poster Award in Computer System Symposium 2009 organized by SIGOS of Information Processing Society of Japan.

October 2009
The Best Paper Award in Internet Conference 2009 organized by SIGHPC Information Processing Society of Japan, ITRC, ITECH, JUS and WIDE.

October 2009
The Best Poster/Demonstration Award in Internet Conference 2009 organized by SIGHPC Information Processing Society of Japan, ITRC, ITECH, JUS and WIDE.

April 2005
The Young Researcher Encouragement Award by Funai Foundation for Information Technology.

April 2005
The Best Paper Award of the FREENIX track in the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2005.

Education

I obtained a Ph.D. of engineering in March 2007 at the Graduate School of Information Science of Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST). I obtained the BS of Geophysics at Faculty of Science in Kyoto University in March 2002.

March 2007
Ph.D. in Information Systems, Graduate School of Information Science,
Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan.

March 2004
M.E. in Information Systems, Graduate School of Information Science,
Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan.

March 2001
B.S. in Geophysics, Graduate School of Science,
Kyoto University, Japan.

Contact

Takahiro Hirofuchi, Ph.D.
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
AIST Tokyo Waterfront, 2-4-7 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0064, Japan E-mail: t.hirofuchi __ aist.go.jp