Alma Riska


Department of Computer Science
Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795
E-mail: riska at cs dot wm dot edu
I am a Research Staff Member at Seagate Research Center in Pittsburgh, PA. My current focus is on designing new storage devices that are aware of and adaptive to the highly dynamic operational environment of computer systems (publications).
I completed my PhD at the Computer Science Department of the College of William & Mary in December 2002. The thesis of my PhD was that carefull workload characterization and accurate modeling assists systems analysis both off- and on-line for higher adaptivity in todays dynamic operational environment.
In my PhD, I extended and developed a new aggregation-based methodology, called ETAQA, that efficiently solves Markov processes of M/G/1 and QBD type. I used these type of processes to model and analyze clustered Web servers (publications).
Using workload characterization and parameterization techniques proposed in my thesis as well as ETAQA, I have succesfully modeled, analysed, and proposed new content-aware resource allocation policies in clusters of Web servers that take into account the dynamic behavior of Internet traffic (publications).