Mary K. Vernon

Professor of Computer Sciences and Industrial Engineering

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

telephone: (608) 262-1204
fax: (608) 262-9777
email: vernon@cs.wisc.edu
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~vernon/

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1983
Interests: Techniques and applications of computer systems performance analysis, parallel/distributed architectures and operating systems, multimedia storage servers.

Research Summary

I am interested in analytic performance modeling techniques and their application to computer system design questions, with an emphasis on parallel and distributed system design issues. The modeling techniques I have developed together with graduate students and colleagues include the Generalized Timed Petri Net (GTPN), customized approximate mean value analysis (customized AMVA), deterministic task graph analysis (DTGA), LoPC, and adaptation of a technique called interpolation approximations for analysis of parallel processor allocation policies.

We have validated these techniques and used them to explore significant design issues for cache coherence protocols, bus arbitration protocols, mesh interconnection networks with wormhole routing, the Sequent Symmetry bus, the Cray UNICOS operating system semaphore structure, parallel applications, parallel system job scheduling policies, global memory management in NOWs, memory architectures for parallel systems with complex modern processors, multimedia storage servers, and caching strategies for large popular widely-shared (web) data objects. The bus arbitration protocol study included development of two new arbitration protocols that were patented by the University of Wisconsin and are in use in commercial systems. The Cray UNICOS study led to the redesign of the operating system semaphore structure.

Current research projects include: (1) a partnership with the National Computational Science Alliance to develop improved job scheduling for the NCSA 512-node SGI Origin 2000 system, (2) end-to-end performance analysis of large, heterogeneous, adaptive computer/communication systems (POEMS), (3) scalable information infrastructure/multimedia delivery techniques, and (4) global memory management policies for networks of workstations.

Sample Recent Publications

Analytic evaluation of shared memory systems with ILP processors (with D. Sorin, V. Pai, S. Adve, and D. Wood), Proceedings of the ISCA '98, pp. 180-191, Barcelona, July 1998.

Dynamic skyscraper broadcasts for video-on-demand (with D. Eager), Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Multimedia Information Systems (MIS '98), vol. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1508, pp. 18-32, Istanbul, Springer, September 1998.

Optimized regional caching for on-demand data delivery (with D. Eager and M. Ferris), Proceedings of the Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN '99), San Jose, CA, January 1999.

This page was automatically created December 30, 1998.
Email pubs@cs.wisc.edu to report errors.