I am PhD candidate at Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Currently I am working at Swedish Institute of Computer Science Research Lab. My research intrests are distributed storage systems and cloud computing.

Before joining SICS/KTH, I worked as lecturer at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences; and as Systems Software Engineer at Streaming Networks.

Projects

HopsFS

HopsFS is a next-generation distribution of Apache Hadoop File System, that delivers a quantum leap in both the cluster-size and throughput compared to Hadoop clusters. HopsFS delivers over 16 times the throughput of the Hadoop Filesystem (HDFS) for a real-world Hadoop workload from Spotify. HopsFS’ key innovation is a novel distributed architecture for managing Hadoop’s metadata in MySQL Cluster, Oracle’s open-source NewSQL database.

Publications

The list of publication can also be found on Google Scholar and DBLP.

2018

HopsFS: Scaling Hierarchical File System Metadata Using NewSQL Databases. Salman Niazi, Mahmoud Ismail, Seif Haridi, Jim Dowling. Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies, Springer International Publishing. 2018.

2017

Scaling HDFS to more than 1 million operations per second with HopsFS. Mahmoud Ismail, Salman Niazi, Mikael Ronström, Seif Haridi and Jim Dowling. 17TH IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid (CCGRID). Madrid, Spain, 2017. It won the 10th IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2017).”

Size Matters: Improving the Performance of Small Files in HDFS. Salman Niazi, Seif Haridi, Jim Dowling. Poster Presented at EuroSys 2017,Belgrade, Serbia.

HopsFS: Scaling Hierarchical File System Metadata Using NewSQL Databases. Salman Niazi, Mahmoud Ismail, Seif Haridi, Jim Dowling, Steffen Grohsschmiedt and Mikael Ronström. 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST). California, USA, 2017.

2015

Leader Election Using NewSQL Database Systems. Salman Niazi, Mahmoud Ismail, Gautier Berthou and Jim Dowling. Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 15th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference (DAIS). Grenoble, France, 2015.

BiobankCloud: A Platform for the Secure Storage, Sharing, and Processing of Large Biomedical Data Sets. Alysson Bessani, Jörgen Brandt, Marc Bux, Vinicius Cogo, Lora Dimitrova, Jim Dowling, Ali Gholami, Kamal Hakimzadeh, Micheal Hummel, Mahmoud Ismail, Erwin Laure, Ulf Leser, Jan-Eric Litton, Roxanna Martinez, Salman Niazi, Jane Reichel, Karin Zimmermann. VLDB Workshop on Big Graphs Online Querying. Hawaii, USA, 2015.

Privacy-preservation for publishing sample availability data with personal identifiers. Ali Gholami, Erwin Laure, Peter Somogyi, Ola Spjuth, Salman Niazi, Jim Dowling. Journal of Medical and Bioengineering. 2015.

2011

Usurp: Distributed NAT Traversal for Overlay Networks. Salman Niazi and Jim Dowling. Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems: 11th IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, (DAIS). Reykjavik, Iceland. 2011

A skew handling join algorithm for Google’s MapReduce framework. Fariha Atta, Stratis D. Viglas, Salman Niazi. 2011 IEEE 14th International Multitopic Conference (INMIC). Karachi, Pakistan, 2011.

Awards

  • 2017 – Won the 10th IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2017).
  • 2008 – Received overseas scholarship for Masters and PhD by Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.
  • 2006 – Project “Bluetooth Ad Hoc Network Framework for Mobile Devices” stood 1st in KTech Software Competition, held in Kohat University, Pakistan.
  • 2006 – Project “Bluetooth Ad Hoc Network Framework for Mobile Devices” stood 3rd in fifth All Pakistan Inter College/University Software Competition and Exhibition, COMPPEC 2006 held in NUST, Pakistan.
  • 2002 - 2006 – Placed in the Dean’s List of Academic Excellence, in BS(CS) in NUCES, Pakistan.
  • 2006 – Gold Medal for standing first in BS (CS).
  • 2000 - 2002 – Edwardes’ College Gold Medal for Academic Excellence in 2001 and 2002.

Teaching

  • 2013 - 2016 - Teaching Assistant for the Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing Course (ID2210) at KTH, Sweden.
  • 2015 - 2016 - Teaching Assistant for the Operating Systems Courses (IS1350 & ID2200) at KTH, Sweden.
  • 2016 - Teaching Assistant for the Data Mining Course (ID2222) at KTH, Sweden.
  • 2011 - Course Instructor for Network Programming and Data Structures courses at NUCES, Pakistan.

Contact

Phone: 0046 (0) 70 191 71 75