CV
Education, projects, research, and industry experience. PDF at the top.
Contact Information
| Name | Zhufeng (Zephyr) Qiu |
| Professional Title | Ph.D. Applicant — GPU Systems, HPC, and ML Systems |
| zhufqiu@gmail.com | |
| Phone | +1 (206) 670-8645 |
| Location | Seattle, Washington |
| Website | https://www.zhufqiu.com |
Academic Interests
Professional Summary
I build efficient and scalable systems for large-scale AI workloads, focusing on GPU optimization, collective communication, and distributed execution. My experience spans parallel data processing, production-scale distributed systems, and performance engineering across serial CPU, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and NCCL backends — including lossless compression of collective payloads and a controlled study of when communication–computation overlap pays. These motivate my pursuit of Ph.D. research at the intersection of HPC and ML systems, particularly GPU runtime optimization, communication-efficient execution, and high-performance LLM training and inference.
Education
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2023 - 2025 Seattle, WA, US
M.S.
Northeastern University, Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Computer Science
- Parallel Data Processing, Algorithms, Computer Networking, Cloud Computing, Database Management Systems
- GPA: 4.0/4.0
- Completed at Northeastern’s Seattle campus.
- Teaching Assistant for Algorithms and Parallel Data Processing.
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2019 - 2021 Los Angeles, CA, US
M.S.
University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering
Applied Data Science
- Scientific Computing and Visualization, Analysis of Algorithms, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Database Systems
- GPA: 3.83/4.0
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2014 - 2018 Wuhan, China
B.S.
Wuhan University, School of Resource and Environmental Sciences
Geographical Information Science
- Data Structures, Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics, Probability and Mathematical Statistics, C Programming
- GPA: 3.58/4.0
Experience
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2025 - Present Seattle, WA (Remote)
Software Development Engineer
Beaconfire Solutions Inc.
- Developed enterprise HR and digital-commerce microservices with Spring Boot/Spring Cloud, integrating authenticated APIs, relational/document data stores, AWS S3, and RabbitMQ-backed asynchronous workflows.
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2024 - 2025 Seattle, WA, US
Teaching Assistant — Algorithms and Parallel Data Processing
Northeastern University, Khoury College of Computer Sciences
- Supported graduate coursework in algorithms and distributed data processing, covering MapReduce, Spark, and parallel execution models.
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2021 - 2022 Wuhan, China
R&D Engineer
NSFOCUS Technologies Group Co., Ltd.
- Built and maintained distributed security-data pipelines using Kafka and Elasticsearch for multi-source log ingestion and normalization, and implemented Spark/MapReduce batch workflows serving 100+ enterprise clients and processing approximately 5M records per day.
- Developed host-anomaly detection features for illicit file transfers and backdoor processes using fuzzy inference, hierarchical clustering, and k-core graph mining over multidimensional security logs.
- Contributed to a production alerting workflow that achieved effective response for 100% of severe threats and 90% of high-risk threats in a telecom deployment.
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2018 - 2019 Wuhan, China
R&D Engineer Intern
NSFOCUS Technologies Group Co., Ltd.
- Processed and normalized multi-source security logs covering user operations, file access, and process behavior to support downstream host-anomaly analysis.
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2018 - 2018 Wuhan University, China
Web-Based Dynamic Thematic Mapping Technologies
Undergraduate Thesis — SinoMaps Press Collaboration
Advisors: Prof. Haihong Zhu and Yuntao Long
- Surveyed web-based thematic-mapping methods and designed the overall, functional, and logical architecture for online visualization, interaction, and dynamic data updates.
- Built and validated a D3.js customs trade-map and map-service prototype supporting thematic visualization, statistical charts, interactive queries, and live data updates.
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2016 - 2017 Wuhan University, China
PM2.5 Inversion and Spatiotemporal Analysis for the Wuhan Metropolitan Area — Core Team Member
National Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program
Advisor: Prof. Huanfeng Shen
- Integrated ground-monitoring measurements, NASA MODIS/AOD satellite observations, and meteorological data, performing preprocessing and spatiotemporal matching across multiple data sources.
- Contributed to the development and evaluation of a mixed-effects model for PM2.5 inversion, using cross-validation and baseline comparisons to assess predictive performance.
- Used MATLAB/R for modelling and ArcGIS to generate spatially continuous PM2.5 concentration maps across the Wuhan “1+8” metropolitan area; the national program passed final review with a Good rating.
Projects
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Jul 2026
– Aug 2026Multi-GPU Similarity Engine — Lossless Collective Compression & Overlap
C++, CUDA, NCCL, MPI, OpenMP, PySpark, CMake, Nsight Systems — extension of USC INF 553 Data Mining / CSCI 596 Scientific Computing projects
- Re-engineered a Yelp collaborative-filtering workload from Spark into serial C++, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and dual-GPU NCCL backends behind a frozen numerical contract; every backend bit-exact, processing 1.17M candidate pairs in 4.21 ms on two NVIDIA A100s — 312× serial, ~20× over 16-thread OpenMP.
- Compressed the NCCL AllReduce payload 3× losslessly (56.2 → 18.8 MB) by packing six integer sufficient statistics into two uint64 words with carry-free fields, letting NCCL sum them in compressed form without decompressing; verified bit-exact across 2.58M pairs.
- Isolated the interconnect by running the identical binary on NVLink and PCIe — communication is 11% vs 91% of the iteration, so the same compression buys 4% vs 55%, and combined with overlap cuts the PCIe iteration 2.53×.
- Derived and Nsight-verified the overlap ceiling min(compute, comm)/total — overlap pays when compute and communication are comparable, not when communication is large; a chunk-size sweep also exposed and fixed a double-buffering race.
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Jul 2025
– Aug 2026Quantized LLM Inference Study on a LoRA-Fine-Tuned Llama 3.1 8B
Python, PyTorch, CUDA, PEFT/LoRA, bitsandbytes, Hugging Face Transformers, Modal — independent inference-systems study extending an LLM-engineering course fine-tune
- Fine-tuned Meta Llama 3.1 8B with QLoRA (rank 32 / α 64 on attention projections, 27M trainable parameters — 0.34% of base) under completion-only supervision on a curated 400,000-item dataset, and served it 4-bit NF4 on an NVIDIA T4 via Modal.
- Built a CUDA-event inference benchmark across four quantization configurations on Turing and Ampere, decomposing latency into prefill and decode against an analytical roofline; showed 97% of the tokens are prefill but only 39% of the time is — decode costs 54× more per token.
- Identified a 2.50× end-to-end regression in the deployed configuration — a bf16 compute dtype carried over from Ampere training onto Turing, which has no bf16 tensor cores. Localized entirely to prefill (4.42×, MFU collapsing to 3.2%) and isolated by an unquantized control agreeing within 0.8%.
- {“Showed 4-bit quantization buys capacity, not speed — NF4 decode runs 1.69× slower than fp16 while moving 3.9× fewer bytes, reaching 9.8% of peak bandwidth against fp16’s 64.1%”=>”dequantization-bound, not bandwidth-bound.”}
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Mar 2026
– May 2026Zephyr Manus — Agent Execution and Tool-Orchestration Platform
FastAPI, Redis Streams, PostgreSQL, Docker, Next.js, MCP/A2A — independent project
- Built a Planner–ReAct agent runtime supporting task decomposition, external-tool execution, persistent state, and human-in-the-loop wait/resume workflows.
- Developed Docker-isolated execution for Browser, Shell, and File tools and an event-driven FastAPI backend using Redis Streams, PostgreSQL, SSE, and MCP/A2A.
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Jan 2025
– Sep 2025Train Ticket Flash-Sale System
Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Redis, RocketMQ, MySQL — independent project
- Built a high-concurrency ticket-purchasing service using Redis-based inventory control and RocketMQ-based asynchronous processing to decouple request handling from downstream order creation.
- Designed idempotency and consistency mechanisms for concurrent requests, mitigating duplicate purchases, overselling, and retry-related failures under flash-sale workloads.
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Feb 2024
– May 2024Distributed Apriori Mining on Yelp Dataset
Java, Hadoop MapReduce, HBase, Hive, AWS S3 — Northeastern CS 6240 Parallel Data Processing
- Built a distributed Apriori pipeline on Hadoop MapReduce over ~550K Yelp reviews and ~15K businesses, decomposing candidate generation, support counting, pruning, and iterative frequent-itemset discovery, with Hive external tables preprocessing raw JSON into per-user review baskets.
- Implemented two interchangeable storage backends for cross-pass state — an HBase path materializing each pass as a table with support filtering applied at write time, and a file-based path over HDFS/S3 with a runtime flag switching between local and S3 discovery of per-pass outputs.
Skills
Awards
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2016 Outstanding Student Leader
Wuhan University
Awarded in both the 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 academic years.
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2015 Outstanding Individual in Theoretical Study
Wuhan University