ProfessorPeter Harrison

Peter Harrison is Professor of Mathematical Modelling in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where he has worked since 1976. He graduated at Christ's College Cambridge as a Wrangler in Mathematics in 1972 and went on to gain Distinction in Part III of the Mathematical Tripos in 1973, winning the Mayhew prize for Applied Mathematics. He has researched into stochastic performance modelling and algebraic program transformation for some thirty five years, visiting IBM Research Centers for two spells. He has written two books, had over 200 research papers published and chaired the Joint Sigmetrics/Performance conference at Imperial in 2012. The results of his research have been exploited extensively in industry, forming an integral part of Metron's Athene capacity planning tool. In the early 2000s he developed, and later mechanised, the RCAT methodology, from which new product-forms for Markovian networks have been found by several authors, and pioneered in the modelling of flash storage systems, incorporating dynamic workloads via Hidden Markov Models. Response time distributions have always been a favourite and are currently being investigated in sharded storage systems, task-replication and energy-saving, using both generating function and matrix analytic methods.