Zhixiong Xiao
Z

Zhixiong Xiao 肖志雄

Incoming PhD Student
The Ohio State University

I am an incoming Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, advised by Prof. Xiaodong Zhang. My research sits at the intersection of computer systems, GPU architecture, and high-performance computing, with a focus on repurposing ray tracing (RT) cores, massively hardware-accelerated parallel spatial-query engines originally built for graphics, to accelerate broader computational workloads. I received my M.Eng. from Shandong University, advised by Prof. Mengbai Xiao, and B.Eng. from Dalian Maritime University.


News

2026
Accepted a PhD offer in CSE from The Ohio State University. Mar 25
2025
Started my gap year. Sep 01
Graduated from Shandong University with a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Technology. Jun 17

Research

GPU RT Core Repurposing. Modern GPUs include dedicated RT cores for accelerating ray-triangle intersections and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversals. My work investigates how these massively parallel spatial-query engines can be reprogrammed for graph algorithms, vector search, and scientific computing, workloads far beyond computer graphics.

GPU Acceleration Ray Tracing Hardware General-Purpose GPU (GPGPU) High-Performance Computing

Vector Search Acceleration. My work explores GPU-accelerated approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search leveraging RT cores and GPU direct storage (GDS) techniques to scale to billion-scale datasets with low latency.

Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) Search High-Dimensional Vector Search GPU Direct Storage (GDS)

KV Cache Management.

Selected Publications

A Case Study for Ray Tracing Cores: Performance Insights with Breadth-First Search and Triangle Counting in Graphs
Zhixiong Xiao , Mengbai Xiao , Yuan Yuan , Dongxiao Yu , Rubao Lee , Xiaodong Zhang
International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS), 2025