SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award for Nikolas Herbst

One of the two winning dissertations – Methods and Benchmarks for Auto-Scaling Mechanisms in Elastic Cloud Environments – was authored by Nikolas Herbst at the Chair for Software Engineering (Informatik II), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Samuel Kounev.
Herbst proposes several methods and related tools for automatically provisioning and scaling elastic resources for cloud systems. The selection committee appreciated the exceptional effort put into validation using plausible workloads.

Twitter,  SPEC Research

The award selection committee for 2018 was chaired by Evgenia Smirni (College of William and Mary) and consisted of the following members:

• André van Hoorn (Universität Stuttgart, Germany) 
• Diwakar Krishnamurthy (University of Calgary, Canada) 
• Arif Merchant (Google, USA) 
• Erich Nahum (IBM Research, USA) 
• Vittoria de Nitto Personè (University of Rome, Italy) 
• Xipeng Shen (NCSU, USA) 
• Xiaoyun Zhu (Hyperpilot, USA)

The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group. It was renamed in 2016 to Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award in memory of Kaivalya Dixit , SPEC’s longtime President). Contributions of interest span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems. Dissertations defended between October 2018 and September 2019 will be eligible to be nominated for the 2019 award. This year, the award committee considered 8 excellent dissertation submissions from universities around the world.