Date: 27 Aug 2005 
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Why take CS547?

I recall some of the concerns that would float around
among (graduate) students when it came time to select
courses: which courses will help me land a good job
after my Masters? or, if one is heading for a Ph.D.,
which courses are directly relevant to my chosen area
of interest? which instructors are great teachers? which
courses are not "killers" in terms of programming effort?
and so on. Well, I would recommend one other key perspective
to use when selecting courses: which portfolio of courses
will give me a broad grounding in the various areas of
Computer Science? In the current era of evolving job markets,
ever changing skill-set requirements, inter-disciplinary/
cross-disciplinary research, cutting-edge products that push
the envelopes of multiple subareas of CS,  etc., it is wise
to ensure that you get a broad grounding in CS that will
serve you well long into your career. In some sense, you
could think of your course portfolio the way you might think
of a stock portfolio -- you are looking for big returns in
the relatively long run, you want to broadbase the portfolio
both to avoid risk and to capture high performance in multiple
sectors, etc.

CS547 is an excellent course that represents a significant
aspect of Computer Science: how to effectively model in a
"theoretical" way the extensive actions and interactions in real
systems and use these models to design better systems and/or
to better predict their behavior. For systems oriented people,
modeling is a very effective and necessary tool, especially
when simulation of systems might be too laborious, too time
consuming, too hard to prove correct, etc. Further,
modeling contributes to a more formal, compact, and
clean way of thinking about and understanding systems,
which is essential for good, clean system design. For
theoretically inclined people, modeling is an excellent avenue
for bringing to bear theoretical ways of thinking on practical
systems, something which is both satisfying from a work
perspective and marketable from a career perspective.
In addition to some theory/algorithms courses and some
programming and systems courses, I would strongly
recommend the Computer Systems Modeling Fundamentals
course for anyone's course portfolio.

Personally, I took this course (as well as the follow-on
700-level course) more than 15 years ago -- Mary Vernon
taught both of them. One indicator of the value of the courses
is that I still keep my course notes very accessible in my
office! Much of my work has been in computer architecture,
where simulation is very common; more recently I have been
working in other areas such as computer networks and multimedia
streaming, but the usefulness and need for modeling has not
changed. I am really glad I took CS547, I hope you choose to
do the course as well.

Sriram Vajapeyam
[Ph.D. 1991, UW-Madison, CS]
[Alumnus Page: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~sriram]

Director, Real-Time Collaboration Research
Oracle Corporation
Bangalore, INDIA
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