Zhihui Du

Principal Senior Researcher · GPU & AI Systems · HPC & Distributed Computing

Department of Data Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Overview

I am a Principal Senior Researcher with over 20 years of experience in GPU-accelerated computing, AI platforms, and large-scale distributed systems. My work bridges low-level system architecture with high-impact scientific discovery, including real-time gravitational wave detection and terabyte-scale graph analytics.

I contributed to the GPU acceleration of gravitational wave pipelines that enabled real-time discovery, work recognized by the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Research & Technical Focus

Selected Contributions

Real-Time Gravitational Wave Detection

Led GPU acceleration of detection pipelines, reducing latency from minutes to approximately 10 seconds. This work enabled real-time astrophysical discovery and contributed directly to Nobel- and Breakthrough-recognized results.

GPU-Accelerated Space Weather Forecasting

Transformed high-fidelity space weather models into operational real-time systems on the Titan supercomputer, achieving over 4× speedup and meeting strict forecasting deadlines.

Scalable Graph Analytics Platform (NSF)

Led a 5-year NSF project extending Arkouda to support interactive Python-based analysis of terabyte-scale graphs, combining HPC performance with data-science usability.

Positions

Publications & Recognition