Interview: Susie Li, Open Source Virtualization Engineering Manager

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on December 1, 2009 at 8:07 am

Shaofan (Susie) Li is an engineering manager in the Open Source Technology Center in Shanghai, PRC. She joined Intel in 1999 and had been involved in IPMI, EFI, and several virtualization projects. She currently manages the virtualization development team of PRC in the Intel Open Source Technology Center. Her team is focusing on enabling Intel Virtualization Technology in Xen and KVM. She received her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, PRC.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Susie: What I like about open source is that it provides us a broader platform to innovate. In many cases, we will support Intel's latest technologies in open source faster than many proprietary products. That gives me a good feeling of always working on cutting-edge technology. Furthermore, the openness of open source enables us to collaborate more broadly and deeply with both industry & academic partners.

Dawn: What are a couple of the most important projects that your team is working on?

Susie: My team is working on enabling Intel Virtualization Technology in open source VMMs (e.g. Xen & KVM). One of the important areas is to achieve good I/O performance & scalability for virtual machines. The pure software solution has various limitations, e.g. causing high CPU utilization overhead. By using Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) & SR-IOV, we can satisfy even the most I/O demanding applications in a virtualized environment.

Dawn: I noticed that you are on the program committee for Xen Summit Asia. Can you tell us a little more about the event?

Susie: Xen Summit Asia is the premier annual event for the Xen.org community to meet in Asia for 2 days of in-depth technical analysis and discussion of the various Xen.org community projects including the Xen Hypervisor. This years event in Shanghai at Intel’s R&D facility is the first time it's landing in China. Xen Summit Asia 2009, with 330 people registered, will be the largest Xen Summit ever held and will host the official launch of the Xen Cloud Project; a new offering from the Xen.org community for Cloud Hosting providers looking for an open source platform to build their business on. Xen Summit events are targeted at Xen developers and virtualization gurus to help drive the roadmap and technologies for the Xen.org projects.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working at Intel?

Susie: Honestly, I'm not a persistent person in terms of hobbies. I will change interests from time to time :) Currently, I like doing yoga very much. It can really relax me. I also like photography, which offers me an opportunity to go around the city and bring back those beautiful things.

Categories: Manageability & Security, Open Source
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