Rate My Professor Ali Butt

Ali R. Butt is a Professor of Computer Science (and Electrical and Computer Engineering by courtesy) at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Associate Department Head for Faculty Development in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the stack@cs Center for Computer Systems. He leads the Distributed Systems & Storage Laboratory (DSSL). Butt earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2006. His research specializations include cloud and high-performance computing systems, systems support for machine and deep learning applications, file, I/O, and storage systems, distributed systems, and large-scale experimental computer systems.

Butt's career at Virginia Tech has included progressive appointments, from assistant professor—for which he received the College of Engineering Dean's Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor in 2009—to his current professorial position. He has held visiting roles as Academic Visitor at IBM Almaden Research Center in summer 2012 and Visiting Research Fellow at Queen's University of Belfast in summer 2013. Major awards and honors include the NSF CAREER Award (2008), IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2015), IBM Shared University Research Award (2009), NetApp Faculty Fellowships (2011, 2015), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Faculty Fellow (2013), and ACM Distinguished Member status. He is an alumnus of the US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (2009), US-Japan Frontiers of Engineering (2012), and National Academy of Sciences' Arvind and Chandrasekhar Arab Symposium on Sensor Science (2015), and organized the US Frontiers of Engineering in 2010. Key publications encompass "FLStore: Efficient Federated Learning Storage for Non-training Workloads" (2025, MLSys), "10Cache: Heterogeneous Resource-Aware Tensor Caching and Migration for LLM Training" (2025, SoCC), "IP-FL: Incentive-driven Personalization in Federated Learning" (2025, IPDPS), and "FedCaSe: Enhancing Federated Learning with Heterogeneity-aware Caching and Scheduling" (2024, SoCC). Butt influences the field through editorial contributions as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (since 2018) and ACM Transactions on Storage (since 2016), and committee roles such as General Chair of ACM HPDC (2023), TPC Area Co-Chair for SC (2026), and Steering Committee member for HPDC (since 2019).