Allen B. Downey

These pages describe the work I did as a researcher (technically, a Junior Fellow) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I am now a professor of Computer Science at Colby College. This page is no longer being updated, but you can find out what I'm doing now at my new homepage.

I recieved my Ph.D. in computer science from the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley

Lachesis

My primary research project was a new job scheduler, called Lachesis, for the Cray T3E at SDSC.

Scheduling Parallel Scientific Applications

The topic of my Ph.D. dissertation is scheduling scientific applications on parallel computers. Here are my publications on the topic:

"A parallel workload model and its implications for processor allocation," click here.
"A model for speedup of parallel programs," click here.
"Predicting queue times on space-sharing parallel computers," click here.
"Using Queue Time Predictions for Processor Allocation," click here.
"Scheduling Parallel Jobs on Partitionable Parallel Computers," my qualifying exam proposal, click here.

At various times I have worked with members of the AppLeS group at UCSD, and the DOCT project at SDSC.

Along the way I collected a lot of accounting data from parallel computers. Some of it is available here.

Migrating UNIX processes

I worked on a simulation study of preemptive migration for UNIX processes. Click here for more information.

VIGL

VIGL is A visualization library for irregular grids (currently used by Phil Collela's CFD group and Scott Baden's KeLP project). If you are doing computational fluid dynamics, or just want a nice Tcl/tk array visualizer, go to the VIGL home page.

Random floating-point

Click here for a weird paper I wrote about generating random floating-point values.

How to contact me:

At Colby :

5830 Mayflower Hill

Colby College

Waterville, ME 04901

abdowney@colby.edu

Public key:

downey@sdsc.edu