Neil J. Gunther: Biography, Current Research Interests, Awards, Quotes, Selected Bibliography, and a List of Books by Author Neil J. Gunther

Search - List of Books by Neil J. Gunther

Neil Gunther, (born 15 August 1950) is a computer information systems researcher best known internationally for developing the open-source performance modeling software Pretty Damn Quick and developing the Guerrilla approach to computer capacity planning and performance analysis. He has also been cited for his contributions to the theory of large transients in computer systems and packet networks, and his universal law of computational scalability.

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.

Biography more less

Gunther is an Australian of German and Scots ancestry, born in Melbourne on 15 August 1950. He attended Preston East Primary School from 1955 to 1956, and Balwyn North Primary School from 1956 until 1962. For his tenth birthday, Gunther received a copy of the now famous book entitled The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from an older cousin. Inspired by the book, he started working on various experiments, making use of various chemicals that could be found around in his house. After he spilled some potassium permanganate solution on his bedroom carpet his mother confined him to an alcove in the garage which he turned into a small laboratory, replete with industrial chemicals and second-hand laboratory glassware. Gunther was interested in finding out how things like detergents and oils were composed by cracking them in his fractionating column. He took particular interest in mixing paints for his art classes, as well as his chemistry classes in Balwyn High School. His father, being the Superintendent of Melbourne's electrical power station, borrowed an organic chemistry text from the chemists in the quality control laboratory. This ultimately led to an intense interest in synthesizing Azo dyes. At around age 14, Gunther attempted to predict the color of azo dyes based on the chromophore-auxochrome combination. Apart from drawing up empirical tables, this effort was largely unsuccessful due to his lack of knowledge of quantum theory.

Post-Doc years

Gunther taught physics at San Jose State University from 1980-1981. He then joined Syncal Corporation, a small company contracted by NASA and JPL to develop thermoelectric materials for their deep-space missions. Gunther was asked to analyze the thermal stability test data from the Voyager RTG. He discovered that the stability of the silicon-germanium (Si-Ge) thermoelectric alloy was controlled by a soliton-based precipitation mechanism. JPL used his work to select the next generation of RTG materials for the Galileo misson launched in 1989.

Xerox years

In 1982, Gunther joined Xerox PARC to develop parametric and functional test software for PARC's small-scale VLSI design fabrication line. Ultimately, he was recruited onto the Dragon multiprocessor workstation project where he also developed the PARCbench multiprocessor benchmark. This was his first fore into computer performance analysis.

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.

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.ogga booga i c u

Current Research Interests more less

Awards more less

Quotes more less

Selected Bibliography more less

Theses

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

B.Sc. Honors dissertation, Department of Physics, Oct. (1974)

Dynamical Symmetry Groups: The Study and Interpretation of Certain Invariants as Group Generators in Quantum Mechanics, La Trobe

University (AUS), M.Sc. dissertation, Department of Applied Mathematics, Nov. (1976)

Broken Dynamical Symmetries in Quantum Field Theory and Phase Transition Phenomena, University of Southampton (U.K.), Ph.D.

dissertation, Department of Physics, Dec. (1979)

Books

The Practical Performance Analyst, McGraw-Hill, New York, New York 1998, ISBN 0079129463 (Out of print)
The Practical Performance Analyst, iUniverse.com Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2000, ISBN 059512674X (Reprint edition)
Performance Engineering: State of the Art and Current Trends, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag

Heidelberg, Germany, October 2001, ISBN 3540421459 ( Contributed chapter)

Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ, Springer, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3540208658
Guerrilla Capacity Planning, Springer, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3540261389

Invited presentations

Goldstone Modes in First-order Phase Transitions, Sixth West Coast Conference on Statistical Mechanics, IBM Research Laboratories, San Jose, June (1980)
Instanton Techniques for Queueing Models of Large Computer Systems: Getting a Piece of the Action, SIAM Conference on Applied Probability in Science and Engineering, New Orleans, Louisiana, March (1990)
(Numerical) Investigations into Physical Power-law Models of Internet Traffic Using the Renormalization Group, IFORS Conference of Operations Research Societies, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 11-15 (2005)

Papers

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)