Mary Vernon is a Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research targets the development and state-of-the-art application of computer systems performance modeling techniques that can be used to design new near-optimal computer/communication system architectures with known performance properties. She has made contributions to commercial bus arbiters, cache coherence protocols, mesh interconnection networks with wormhole routing, the Sequent Symmetry bus design, commercial memory system design methods, analysis of parallel shared memory system architectures, commercial operating system semaphore architectures, production parallel system job scheduling policies, the design of grid applications and middleware, near-optimal scalable video streaming protocols, media content delivery cost models, network security, network traffic characterization, reliable network transport (TCP) protcols, customized MVA modeling techniques, LogP modeling techniques, task graph analysis techniques, interpolation approximation techniques, workload characterization methods, and Petri net modeling techniques. Her current research includes development of analytic modeling methods, high performance network transport protocols, network traffic analysis and workload characterization, and optimized chip multiprocessor hardware/software co-design.
Vernon received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the ACM Fellow award in 1995 for "fundamental contributions to performance analysis of parallel computer architectures and for leadership in the computing research community", a UW-Madison Vilas Associate award in 2000, and the UW-Madison Kellett Midcareer Award in 2006. She is a co-inventor on two U.S. patents for bus arbitration protocols, and on four U.S. patents for streaming media delivery protocols. She has co-authored over 80 technical papers, including seven award papers (most recent: Sigcomm 2001, Infocom 2004, 2005 USENIX Security Symposium). She has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the 1993 NSF Blue Ribbon Panel for High Performance Computing, the NSF CISE Advisory Board, the CRA Board of Directors, on external review committees for various engineering colleges and computer science departments, and as Chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS.
Techniques and applications of computer systems performance analysis, high performance network protocols, networked system security, parallel/distributed applications and architectures, Grid and cluster job scheduling.
The theme of my research to date has been the development and application of analytic modeling techniques that enable the design of software, hardware, and communication networks with near-optimal performance. The contributions have included (1) customized equations that directly specify an optimal system design, (2) analytic bounds that quantify the opportunity for improvement as well as the target system performance, (3) customized analytic models that reflect the mechanics of the system and that accurately estimate measured system performance for various design options, and (4) application of the models to derive or invent new near-optimal systems that significantly outperform previous systems.
Analytic models that are accurate, yet as abstract as possible, readily expose system features that optimize or inhibit system performance, including any performance bottlenecks that can be eliminated. Thus, the research in analytic design of commercially important systems has led to significant insights into system design bottlenecks, leading to important new system designs in addition to the new system design techniques.
The modeling techniques I've developed previously together with graduate students, an undergraduate student, and faculty colleagues include:
- the Generalized Timed Petri Net (GTPN) (with Mark Holliday),
- Customized Approximate Mean Value Analysis (CMVA) (with Derek Eager, Ed Lazowska, Haonan Tan, and John Zahorjan),
- deterministic task graph analysis (with Vikram Adve),
- interpolation approximations for evaluating parallel processor scheduling policies (with Rajesh Mansharamani),
- LoPC (with Matthew Frank and Anant Agarwal), and
- models for determining the proxy server content that minimizes delivery cost for multicast streaming media (with Jussara Almeida, Derek Eager, and Michael Ferris).
Our recent innovations in CMVA include analysis of high variability in service times and the resulting highly bursty arrivals to downstream servers, as well as models that estimate client loss probabilities as low as one in ten thousand.
We have validated these techniques and used them to obtain important new design insights for bus arbitration, cache coherence protocols, mesh interconnection networks with wormhole routing, the Sequent Symmetry bus, parallel shared memory system architectures (with complex modern processors), the Cray UNICOS operating system semaphores, complex parallel/distributed applications, parallel processor scheduling policies, global memory management in NOWs, scalable on-demand continuous media delivery protocols, and content distribution networks for popular media objects.
My current research includes the design of key parallel/distributed applications, high performance network transport protocols, efficient network bandwidth estimation techniques, methods for estimating the arrival rate of bursty arrival processes, storage systems, and optimized server and client software co-designed with optimized CMP hardware support. Further information about these current research activities is available in the web pages for my current research projects.