Vijay Garg, Cullen Trust Endowed Professor, was awarded $242K from the National Science Foundation. The project introduces the idea of fusible data structures and fusible state machines. Given a fusible data structure, it is possible to combine a set of such structures into a single 'fused' structure. This approach greatly reduces the space required for backups compared to currently used methods without significantly affecting normal operations on the original data structures. The project involves implementing a library that uses fusion for standard data types, thus enabling users to transparently use these ideas in their programs without any programming overhead.

Professor Garg has authored four textbooks--Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java, Elements of Distributed Computing, Principles of Distributed Systems, and Modeling and Control of Logical Discrete Event Systems--and is a recognized expert on distributed systems.