Patricia (Pat)
Teller is a
very
engaging
person,
ready with
little anecdotes
and stories
to liven her
words. She must
employ these tactics in her numerous research
and teaching endeavors. As a goal-oriented individual,
Pat uses her quick wit and other skills to
pursue her dreams whether in facilitating the
use of high-performance computing or in
obtaining two horses for her six-acre homestead
in New Mexico.
As a professor at the University of Texas at El
Paso (UTEP) her drive and passion this year
have garnered her not only her second IBM
Faculty Award for her research, but also a SUR
Grant, which is providing new high-performance
computing equipment at UTEP, and a
Ph.D. Fellowship for her student, Diana Villa.
Interestingly, Pat's first career was in business,
which she pursued for several years. However,
as she was continuously plagued with boredom
in the workforce, Pat went back to school in
order to pursue computer science. In a recent
interview, Pat shared that computer science
"fascinates me" because it appeals to her
"problem-solver" mind. She received her B.A.,
M.S., and Ph.D. from New York University
(NYU). From there she joined the faculty of
New Mexico State University, and then transitioned
to UTEP, where she is currently an
Associate Professor.
Pat has had a long relationship with IBM.
During her graduate years she worked jointly
with IBM researchers on shared-memory multiprocessor
systems. When she joined the faculty
at UTEP, she noticed that many of her students
were actively recruited by IBM-Austin
for their computer architecture and operating
systems skills. Through them she struck up a
relationship with IBM's Carole Gottleib and Bret Olszewski, Unix Performance, who nominated
her for a Faculty Award from IBM.
Currently Pat is challenging herself with
research for IBM for the second year; in collaboration
with Bret Olszewski and her students,
she is analyzing commercial workload performance
on the p690 memory hierarchy, with
a goal of identifying a general method of generating
miss rate information for future systems.
Her work on the performance tuning of
the pSeries machines will allow IBM to recognize
key changes that could be made to
enhance performance.
Her driving motivation in continuing her work
is to "facilitate the use of high-performance
computing" and "help others" reach their full
potential. For the future she hopes to "facilitate
the use of high-performance computing" at her
university, allowing engineers and scientists to
more aptly use the power of computers to
speed and aid their research.
-By Irene Dhong, 2003 Austin CAS Summer Intern
