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Speeding Up the Digital World For decades, the bottleneck in computer speed wasn’t processing power, but memory. “The CPU was fast, but the memory was slow. It would always lag behind,” says Distinguished Engineering Professor Ken Qing Yang. Engineers solved the problem in part by buffering data in a cache, but memory still lagged. Yang developed with an innovative mathematical technique that reduced conflicts to map memory to the cache, significantly speeding up the process. He followed up with another technique that dramatically sped up access for hard drives, resulting in a commercial company VeloBit that revolutionized storage efficiency. Yang studied at Huazhong University of Science and Technology before earning a master’s at University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in computer engineering at University of Louisiana. “The NSF grants that paid my stipend and tuition during my graduate studies were critical to my research,” says Yang. “They built a foundation for my entire research career. My work has produced graduates who are now research leaders in top U.S.

universities and computer companies such as Intel, Cisco, Meta, Western Digital, and more.” He joined URI in 1988, receiving a $60,000 NSF Research Initiation Award, that allowed him to set up his lab. Since then, he has been continuously funded by the NSF for 36 years, receiving more than a total of $4 million. His disk cache research began in the early 2000s, when he came up with the concept of “content locality” to access data most important to a user. “Let’s say you watch a Celtics game, and afterwards you want to know everything about Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown, the popular scorers,” he explains. “But you are not as interested in less popular players.” Yang’s system prioritized frequently accessed data, placing it in faster memory for quicker retrieval. Rather than relying solely on hard disk drives (HDDs) that use magnets to store data on a spinning disk, requiring the system to wait every time the disc spun around to access it, Yang’s technology placed that popular data on solid state drives (SSDs) that store data in semiconductor chips, achieving a balance between speed and cost.

KUNAL MANKODIYA

KEN YANG Distinguished professor, electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering

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