Neil J. Gunther

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Neil Gunther (born 15 August 1950) is a

Gunther is a Senior Member of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as a member of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), American Physical Society (APS), Computer Measurement Group (CMG) and ACM SIGMETRICS.

He is currently focused on developing quantum information system technologies.^[7]

Biography

Gunther is an Australian of

1989, he developed a Wick-rotated version of Richard Feynman's quantum path integral formalism for analyzing performance degradation in large-scale computer systems and packet networks.^[9]

Pyramid years

In 1990 Gunther joined Pyramid Technology (now part of Fujitsu Siemens Computers) where he held positions as senior scientist and manager of the Performance Analysis Group that was responsible for attaining industry-high TPC benchmarks on their Unix multiprocessors. He also performed simulations for the design of the Reliant RM1000 parallel database server.

Consulting practice

Gunther founded Performance Dynamics Company as a sole proprietorship, registered in California in 1994, to provide consulting and educational services for the management of high performance computer systems with an emphasis on performance analysis and enterprise-wide capacity planning. He went on to release and develop his own open-source performance modeling software called "PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick)" around 1998. That software also accompanied his first textbook on performance analysis entitled The Practical Performance Analyst. Several other books have followed since then.

Current research interests

Quantum information systems

In 2004, Gunther has embarked on joint research into quantum information systems based on

In its simplest rendition, this theory can be considered as providing the

Performance visualization

Inspired by the work of

google group

.

Universal Law of Computational Scalability

The throughput capacity X(N) of a computational platform is given by:

$${\displaystyle X(N)={\frac {\gamma N}{1+\alpha (N-1)+\beta N(N-1)}}}$$

where N represents either the number of physical processors in the hardware configuration or the number of users driving the software application. The parameters ${\displaystyle \alpha }$, ${\displaystyle \beta }$ and ${\displaystyle \gamma }$ respectively represent the levels of contention (e.g., queueing for shared resources), coherency delay (i.e., latency for data to become consistent) and concurrency (or effective parallelism) in the system. The ${\displaystyle \beta }$ parameter also quantifies the retrograde throughput seen in many stress tests but not accounted for in either

At a more fundamental level, the above equation can be derived[14] from the Machine Repairman queueing model:^[15]

Theorem (Gunther 2008): The universal scalability law is equivalent to the synchronous queueing bound on throughput in a modified Machine Repairman with state-dependent service times.

The following corollary (Gunther 2008 with ${\displaystyle \beta =0}$) corresponds to Amdahl's law:^[16]

Theorem (Gunther 2002): Amdahl's law for parallel speedup is equivalent to the synchronous queueing bound on throughput in a Machine Repairman model of a multiprocessor.

Awards

• Senior Member ACM (elected April 2009).
• Senior Member IEEE (elected February 2009).
• Recipient of the A. A. Michelson Award, December 2008.
• Summer Research Institute visitor,
  EPFL
  2006 and 2007.
• Lecturer, Western Institute of Computer Science, Stanford University, 1997–2000.
• Best paper award, CMG conference 1996.
• Visiting Scholar in Materials Science, Stanford University, 1981–1982.
• Science Research Council Studentship, U.K. 1976–1980.
• Commonwealth Postgraduate Scholarship, Australia 1975–1976.

Selected bibliography

Theses

• The Feynman Path Integral in Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Electrodynamics, La Trobe University (AUS),

BSc Honors dissertation, department of physics, October (1974)

• Dynamical Symmetry Groups: The Study and Interpretation of Certain Invariants as Group Generators in Quantum Mechanics, La Trobe University (AUS), MSc dissertation, department of applied mathematics, November (1976)
• Broken Dynamical Symmetries in Quantum Field Theory and Phase Transition Phenomena, University of Southampton (U.K.), PhD dissertation, department of physics, December (1979)

Books

• The Practical Performance Analyst,
  ISBN 0-07-912946-3
  (Out of print)
• The Practical Performance Analyst, iUniverse.com Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2000,
  ISBN 0-595-12674-X
  (Reprint edition)
• Performance Engineering: State of the Art and Current Trends, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag

Heidelberg, Germany, October 2001,

• Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ, Springer, Heidelberg 2005,
  ISBN 3-540-20865-8
• Guerrilla Capacity Planning, Springer, Heidelberg 2007,
  ISBN 3-540-26138-9

• Goldstone Modes in Vacuum Decay and First-order Phase Transitions, Journal of Physics, A, 13, 1755–1767 (1980)
• A Benchmark for Image Retrieval using Distributed Systems over the Internet (2000 with G. Beretta)
• Performance and Scalability Models for a Hypergrowth e-Commerce Web Site (2000)
• Characterization of the Burst Stabilization Protocol for the RR/CICQ Switch (2003 with K. J. Christensen and K. Yoshigoe)
• Unification of Amdahl's Law, LogP and Other Performance Models for Message-Passing Architectures (2005)
• Towards Practical Design Rules for Quantum Communications and Quantum Imaging Devices (2005 with G. Beretta)
• The Virtualization Spectrum from Hyperthreads to GRIDs, Proc. CMG Conf., Reno, Nevada, Dec. (2006)

References