Events Calendar

Quantitative System Design

Title: Quantitative System DesignSpeaker: Prof. Mary K. Vernon, University of WisconsinDate/Time/Location: Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 3:30 pm in Seaver Science Library (SSL) 150 Abstract: This talk will provide a 20-year perspective on the use of analytic models to design of a wide range of commercially important architectures and systems with complex behavior. These systems include resources with highly bursty and/or correlated packet arrivals, communication protocols with complex routing and blocking of messages, resources that are configured for a very high probability (e.g., 0.9999) of providing immediate service to each arriving client, and complex large-scale Grid/Internet applications. The examples illustrate some guiding principles for model development, and show that the models can be relatively easy to develop. More importantly, the models can be highly accurate -- often more accurate than simulation, and sometimes more accurate than the system implementation! The examples also illustrate that the models can provide unique insight into system design as well as significant new system functionality. In other words, analytic models are a key tool for competitive systems engineering. Time permitting, the talk will include some important observations about workload models, and some ways to avoid key pitfalls in simulation.Bio: Mary K. Vernon received a B.S. degree with Departmental Honors in chemistry and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1983 she joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering and Chair of the Computer Sciences Department. Her research interests include performance analysis techniques for evaluating high performance computer/communication system design tradeoffs, Internet transport protocols, optimized CMP hardware/software co-design, and storage system design. She has co-authored over 80 technical papers including seven award papers - most recently one of three "Fast Track to ToN" papers at Infocom 2004, and the Best Paper Award at the 2005 USENIX Security Symposium. Prof. Vernon has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the 1999 NSF Blue Ribbon Panel for High Performance Computing, the NSF CISE Advisory Board, the CRA Board of Directors, the Board of Directors of the NCSA, and as Chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS. She received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the ACM Fellow award in 1996, the UW-Madison Vilas Associate Award in 2000 and the UW-Madison Kellett Mid-career Award in 2006. She is a member of the IFIP WG 7.3 on Information Processing System Modeling, Measurement and Evaluation.Host: Leana Golubchik, Department of Computer Science

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum