Kai Zhao

Biography

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside, in 2022. Prior to that, I received a B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2014. During my Ph.D. studies, I worked as a student intern at Argonne National Laboratory. My research interests are broadly in high-performance computing, with a focus on reliability, efficiency, and data management.

Positions are available in my lab. Please refer to the Hiring page for more information.
FSU is among the top 30 universities in the world in the field of HPC.

News

• 2026 Two papers were accepted to HPDC'26. Congratulations to Zhuoxun and Longtao!
• 2026 One paper was accepted to ICS'26. Congratulations to Ruoyu!
• 2026 Our project on AI-assisted lossy compression design was funded by Argonne National Laboratory. Thanks to Argonne for the support.
• 2025 Three papers were accepted to SC'25.
• 2025 IPComp was accepted to HPDC'25 and selected as a Best Paper Nominee. Congratulations to Zhuoxun!
• 2025 LCP was accepted to SIGMOD'25. Congratulations to Longtao!
• 2025 QPET was accepted to VLDB'25.
• 2025 Our survey on error-bounded lossy compression appeared in ACM Computing Surveys.
• 2025 Longtao and Ruoyu were visiting students at Argonne National Laboratory for Summer 2025.
• 2024 Three papers were accepted to SC'24.
• 2024 One paper was accepted to SIGMOD'24.
• 2024 One paper was accepted to ICDE'24.
• 2024 Two papers were accepted to IPDPS'24.
• 2024 One paper was accepted to ICS'24.
• 2024 SZ3 received the 2023 Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Big Data.
• 2024 Kai received the First Year Assistant Professor Award from Florida State University.
• 2024 Our research was supported by Argonne National Laboratory for streaming lossy compression. Thanks to Argonne for the support.
• 2023 Our NSF CSSI project on a fine-tunable cyberinfrastructure framework for specialized lossy compression development was funded. Thanks to NSF for the support.
• 2023 One paper was accepted to SC'23.
• 2023 One paper was accepted to VLDB'23.
• 2023 One paper was accepted to BigData'23.
• 2023 FAZ was accepted to ICS'23 and selected as a Best Paper Nominee.
• 2023 Kai joined the Department of Computer Science at Florida State University.

Research Interests

• High Performance Computing (HPC)
• Scientific Data Management, Analytics, and Visualization
• Parallel, Distributed and Heterogeneous Systems
• Fault Tolerance and Resilience in Machine Learning and HPC