Yao Xu

Incoming Assistant Professor at Tennessee Tech University · January 2027

Ph.D. Candidate, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University
Advised by Prof. Gene Cooperman

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Portrait of Yao Xu

Research

My research interests are in computer systems and high-performance computing (HPC), with a focus on scalable communication and runtime systems. My work includes MPI, transparent checkpoint-restart, GPU communication and NCCL, performance optimization, and infrastructure for large-scale AI systems.

Prospective Students

I am recruiting Ph.D. students to join my group at Tennessee Tech.

I am particularly interested in students with hands-on experience in systems programming and debugging complex, low-level problems. If interested, please email me with your CV and a brief description of your background and research interests.

Selected Publications

The Case for ABI Interoperability in a Fault Tolerant MPI
IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), 2025
Xu Yao, Grace Nansamba, Anthony Skjellum, Gene Cooperman
Enabling Practical Transparent Checkpointing for MPI: A Topological Sort Approach
IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster), 2024
Xu Yao, Gene Cooperman
Implementation-Oblivious Transparent Checkpoint-Restart for MPI
SC'23 Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis, 2023
Xu Yao, Leonid Belyaev, Twinkle Jain, Derek Schafer, Anthony Skjellum, Gene Cooperman
MANA-2.0: A Future-Proof Design for Transparent Checkpointing of MPI at Scale
SC Workshops Supplementary Proceedings (SCWS), 2021
Xu Yao, Zhengji Zhao, Rohan Garg, Harsh Khetawat, Rebecca Hartman–Baker, Gene Cooperman

See all publications on Google Scholar →

Education