Phuong M. Cao

Phuong Cao is a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research focuses on making AI for Science reliable and secure. His work spans cross-stack supercomputing architectures, e.g., GPUs, quantum computing, and spaceflight systems, protecting open-science applications against cyberattacks and hardware failures on leadership computing facilities.

As Principal Investigator of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, he curates data lakes, measures post-quantum cryptography adoption, and verifies federated authentication across open-science networks. Collaborations with DOE national labs (Argonne), NSF testbeds (FABRIC and National Research Platform), and industry (IBM Research) have resulted in publications in USENIX Security, NSDI, Supercomputing, DSN (Best Paper Award), QCE, and CoNEXt, with resilience models being adopted in exascale supercomputers. [Full Biography]

Realizing resilient and secure supercomputing systems to advance open-science research, in the presence of accidental failures and cyber-attacks is his research goal. The key driver is cross-stack measurements of high-speed interconnects, AI application logs, and kernel probes from sustained petascale supercomputers (Blue Waters), HPC/GPU clusters (DeltaAI). These decade-long curated data (1PB) enables cyberattack detection, error propagation modeling across GPU architectures (Hopper/Blackwell/Rubin) and vendors, and understanding of quantum-resistant cryptography adoption, published in top conferences such as Supercomputing, USENIX Security, and IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering. He is investigating reliability and security challenges of next-generation accelerators such as Quantum Processing Units (QPU) being integrated with HPC.