Email: wei.zhang@tacc.utexas.edu
Wei Zhang joins TACC’s Cloud and Interactive Computing (CIC) Group on as a Research Associate.
Wei earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas Tech University, where his dissertation tackled high-performance data discovery over self-describing scientific files. During graduate school he published a series of influential papers on metadata indexing and graph partitioning that now guide best practices in HPC-scale data management.
Most recently, Wei was a Computer Science Researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, architecting Rust-based NDArray stores and object-centric metadata engines that improved I/O throughput for ensemble GNN training by up to 135 × and accelerated distributed metadata queries by more than two orders of magnitude. Earlier, he spent two years at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where he led the integration of OCI Data Catalog into Big Data Service and built region-aware orchestration frameworks that cut onboarding times for new OCI regions five-fold. Before moving to the U.S., Wei engineered low-latency data pipelines and platform APIs for Weibo.com, serving hundreds of millions of daily users and earning a Chinese patent for automated API generation.
Across academia, national labs, and industry, Wei has developed deep expertise in Rust, Python, Java, C, distributed systems, and HPC/AI convergence. He has authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers (SC, CCGrid, PACT, BigData) and served on program committees for SC, CCGrid, PDSW, and SSDBM. At TACC, he looks forward to transforming these research insights into production-ready services that make advanced computing accessible to scientists across Texas and beyond.
W. Zhang, K. Ibrahim, and S. Byna. Optimizing Distributed Object Storage I/O for Large-scale Parallel GNN Training on Atomistic Graphs (under review)
C. Niu, W. Zhang, Y. Zhao, and Y. Chen. Energy Efficient or Exhaustive? Benchmarking Power Consumption of LLM Inference Engines , in the HotCarbon Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems 2025 (HotCarbon '25). (accepted)
C. Niu, W. Zhang, M. Side, and Y. Chen. ICEAGE: Intelligent Contextual Exploration and Answer Generation Engine for Scientific Data Discovery , in the Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Scalable Scientific Data Management (SSDBM 2025).
H. Oh, W. Zhang, C. Rickett, S. Sukumar, and S. Byna. Evaluating Performance Trade-offs of Caching Strategies for AI-Powered Querying Systems , in the Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2024). (Acceptance Rate: 19.7%)
W. Zhang, H. Tang, and S. Byna. IDIOMS: Index-powered Distributed Object-centric Metadata Search for Scientific Data Management , in the Proceedings of 2024 IEEE/ACM international Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid 2024) (CCGrid 2024).
C. Niu, W. Zhang, S. Byna, and Y. Chen. PSQS: Parallel Semantic Querying Service for Self-describing File Formats , in the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2023).
C. Niu, W. Zhang, S. Byna, and Y. Chen. Kv2vec: A Distributed Representation Method for Key-value Pairs from Metadata Attributes , in the Proceedings of 2022 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC '22). (acceptance rate: 30/120=25%)
W. Zhang, S. Byna, H. Sim, S. Lee, S. Vazhkudai, and Y. Chen. Exploiting User Activeness for Data Retention in HPC Systems , in the Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC '21). (first-around acceptance rate: 86/365=23.6%, another 13 papers being asked for major revisions per SC’21)
N. Zhao, G. Cao, W. Zhang, E. Samson, and Y. Chen. Remote sensing and social sensing for socioeconomic systems: A comparison study between nighttime lights and location-based social media at the 500 m spatial resolution . International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.
D. Dai, Y. Chen, P. Carns, J. Jenkins, W. Zhang, and R. Ross. Managing Rich Metadata in High-Performance Computing Systems Using a Graph Model . IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
N. Zhao, W. Zhang, Y. Liu, E. Samson, Y. Chen, and G. Cao. Improving Nighttime Light Imagery With Location-Based Social Media Data . IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
W. Zhang, S. Byna, C. Niu, and Y. Chen. Exploring Metadata Search Essentials for Scientific Data Management , in the Proceedings of 2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC '19). (acceptance rate: 23%)
W. Zhang, S. Byna, H. Tang, B. Williams, and Y. Chen. MIQS: Metadata Indexing and Querying Service for Self-Describing File Formats , in the Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC '19). (first-around acceptance rate: 72/344=21%, another 15 papers being asked for major revisions per SC '19)
N. Zhao, G. Cao, W. Zhang, and E. Samson. Tweets or nighttime lights: Comparison for preeminence in estimating socioeconomic factors . ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
W. Zhang, H. Tang, S. Byna, and Y. Chen. DART: Distributed Adaptive Radix Tree for Efficient Affix-Based Keyword Search on HPC Systems , in the Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT '18). (acceptance rate: 36/126=28.6%)
W. Zhang, Y. Chen, and D. Dai. AKIN: A Streaming Graph Partitioning Algorithm for Distributed Graph Storage Systems , in the Proceedings of 2018 18th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing(CCGRID '18). (acceptance rate: 20.8%)
D. Dai, W. Zhang, and Y. Chen. IOGP: An Incremental Online Graph Partitioning Algorithm for Distributed Graph Databases , in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC '17). (acceptance rate: 19%)
