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
Email zhufqiu@gmail.com
Phone +1 (206) 670-8645
Location Seattle, Washington
Website https://www.zhufqiu.com

Academic Interests

Research Interests: GPU Systems, High-Performance Computing, Compression-Accelerated Collective Communication, Distributed & Parallel Systems, ML Systems, High-Performance LLM Training & Inference

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

  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • Jul 2026
    – Aug 2026
    Multi-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.
  • Jul 2025
    – Aug 2026
    Quantized 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.”}
  • Mar 2026
    – May 2026
    Zephyr 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.
  • Jan 2025
    – Sep 2025
    Train 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.
  • Feb 2024
    – May 2024
    Distributed 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

HPC / GPU: CUDA, NCCL, MPI, OpenMP, Nsight Systems, CMake
Languages: C/C++, Python, Java, Scala, SQL, JavaScript/TypeScript
ML / LLM: PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, PEFT/LoRA, bitsandbytes, scikit-learn, LangGraph, ReAct, RAG, MCP/A2A
Distributed / Data: Spark/PySpark, Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, HBase, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Chroma, AWS
Systems / Software: Docker, Modal, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Git, Jenkins, Maven

Awards

  • 2016
    Outstanding Student Leader
    Wuhan University

    Awarded in both the 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 academic years.

  • 2015
    Outstanding Individual in Theoretical Study
    Wuhan University