Patrick Bridges's Home Page

I'm an associate professor at the University of New Mexico in the Department of Computer Science. I did my undergraduate work at Mississippi State University and received my Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in December of 2002. My research interest broadly cover operating systems and networks particularly, scaling, composition, and adaptation issues in large-scale systems, and I work with collaborators at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, IBM Research, AT&T Research, and a variety of universities. Outside of work, I have a wonderful family and a range of hobbies that occupy my spare time.

My research is broadly concerned with operating systems and networking. In particular, I'm interested in system software for large-scale systems, including multi-core, supercomputing, and high-performances networked systems. I maintain research webpages on that list my research interests and projects, publications and invited talks, and current and former students. I also maintain a page of information for prospective students that you should read if you're interested in working with me. A few key recent papers are listed below.

• Rolf Riesen, Kurt B. Ferreira, Dilma Da Silva, Pierre Lemarinie, Dorian Arnold, and Patrick G. Bridges. Alleviating scalability issues of checkpointing protocols. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC12), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, November 2012.

• Zheng Cui, Lei Xia, Patrick G. Bridges, Peter A. Dinda, and Jack R. Lange. Optimizing overlay-based virtual networking through optimistic interrupts and cut-through forwarding. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC12), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, November 2012.

• Lei Xia, Zheng Cui, John Lange, Yuabn Tang, Peter Dinda, and Patrick G. Bridges. VNET/P: Bridging the cloud and high-performance computing through fast overlay networking. In Proceedings of the 21st International ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC’12), June 2012.

• Kurt B. Ferreira, Rolf Riesen, Patrick G. Bridges, Dorian Arnold, Jon Stearley, James H. Laros, Ron A. Oldfield, Kevin Pedretti, and Ron Brightwell. Evaluating the viability of process replication reliability for exascale systems. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC11), Seattle, WA, November 2011.

• Patrick G. Bridges, Donour Sizemore, and Scott Levy. Exploiting MISD performance opportunities in multi-core systems. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XIII), Napa, CA, May 2011. Presentation slides available.

• Jack Lange, Kevin Pedretti, Peter Dinda, Patrick G. Bridges, Chang Bae, Philip Soltero, and Alexander Merritt. Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE 2011), Newport Beach, CA, March 2011.

• Jack Lange, Kevin Pedretti, Trammell Hudson, Peter Dinda, Zheng Cui, Lei Xia, Patrick Bridges, Andy Gocke, Steven Jaconette, Mike Levenhagen, and Ron Brightwell. Palacios and Kitten: New open source tools for scalable high performance computing. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2010.

• Edgar A. Léon, Rolf Riesen, Arthur B. Maccabe, and Patrick G. Bridges. Instruction-level simulation of a cluster at scale. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Supercomputing (SC 2009), November 2009.

• Patrick G. Bridges, Matti A. Hiltunen, and Richard D. Schlichting. Cholla: A framework for composing and coordinating system software adaptations. IEEE Transactions on Computers, Special Issue on Autonomic Network Computing, 58(11):1456–1469, November 2009.

• Wenbin Zhu, Patrick G. Bridges, and Arthur B. Maccabe. Lightweight application monitoring and tuning with embedded gossip. IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 20(7):1038–1049, July 2009.

• Rolf Riesen, Ron Brightwell, Patrick G. Bridges, Trammell Hudson, Arthur B. Maccabe, Patrick M. Widener, and Kurt Ferreira. Designing and implementing lightweight kernels for capability computing. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 21(6):791–817, April 2009.

• Kurt B. Ferreira, Ron Brightwell, and Patrick G. Bridges. Characterizing application sensitivity to OS interference using kernel-level noise injection. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (Supercomputing’08), November 2008.

• Patrick G. Bridges, Matti A. Hiltunen, Richard D. Schlichting, Gary T. Wong, and Matthew Barrick. A configurable and extensible transport protocol. ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, 15(6):1254–1265, December 2007.

• CS293 Computer Ethics - Fall 2007
• CS341 Computer Organization - Fall 2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2011
• CS442 Parallel and Distributed Programming - Fall 2009, Spring 2013
• CS460 Software Engineering - Spring 2008
• CS481 Operating Systems - Spring 2008, Spring 2010
• CS485/585 Computer Networking - Fall 2005. Fall 2006
• CS587 Advanced Operating Systems - Spring 2003, Spring 2004, Spring 2005, Spring 2006, Spring 2007, Fall 2008, Fall 2012
• CS591 Special Topics in Systems Software - Fall 2003, Spring 2006
• CS591 Special Topics in Distributed Embedded Systems - Spring 2009
• CS591 Special Topics in System Virtualization - Spring 2012
• Systems Ph.D. Comprehensive Exams
  • List of Topics for Studying
  • Old Exams - Fall 2003 with solutions, Spring 2004,Fall 2004, Spring 2005 with solutions, Fall 2005, Spring 2006, Fall 2006, Spring 2007, Fall 2007, Spring 2008, Fall 2008

If you need to contact me, email is generally the best way. For face-to-face meetings, I'm available during my office hours or by appointment. My office is in 301B in the Farris Engineering Center. In general, I'm happy to meet with students at any time I'm available; if you want to meet, view my calendar, pick a time that is free, and suggest it via email.

If you insist on more old-fashioned means of contacting me, my phone number is 505-277-3032 and my fax number is 505-277-6927. For regular mail, my mail address is:

Patrick G. Bridges
MSC01-1130
1 The University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001

If you need to use a physical mailing address (i.e., for UPS), use:

Patrick G. Bridges
Department of Computer Science
University of New Mexico
Farris Engineering Center #157
Albuquerque, NM 87131

Outside of work, I spend much of my time with my wife Terese, my son Will, and my daughter Elena. Terese and I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona, from which Terese received a Master's degree in Bilingual education and a Ph.D. from the Department of Language, Reading, and Culture. Her Ph.D. research focused on student teachers, particularly in how the language experiences of bilingual student teachers effect their teaching. She currently teaches full time at Zia Elementary School in Albuquerque. Occasionally Terese and I visit Guatemala, where Terese lived for a number of years before we met.

Will was born on February 15, 2002, not long after we moved to Albuqueruque, and Elena was born on December 7, 2006. They both happily take up much of our time. Newer pictures of William and Elena are on Terese's page, and some older pictures, mostly of Will, are on my .Mac pictures page. We regularly attend St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Albuqueruque, a thoughtful, welcoming, progressive church.

Outside of work and family, I have a number of different hobbies that occupy some of my time. For example, I'm an avid Go player and a (weak - AGA 2k or so) student of Alexandre Dinerstein 1p, as well as a volunteer admin on the KGS Go Server. For outdoor activities, I'm a casual tennis player and skier, and I do a decent amount of cycling now and again, too. I enjoy a friendly or low-limit cash game of poker now and again, too. Finally, I like to cook, primarily southern/cajun and southwestern food, and have a recipe page that I occasionally edit. New Mexico is a great place to be for all of these hobbies.

Despite growing up in largely-conservative Mississippi, I'm an unabashed liberal, though in the more classical, positive liberalism (think John Stuart Mill) sense of the word as opposed to the prejorative sense of the word. This means I fully support all of the amendments to the constitution, particularly including free speech, the separation of Church and State, and the right to bear arms. I also support progressive social policy (for example strong public education, head start, and the social safety net) to the extent that it is economically feasible. In particular, I believe that the long term moral and economic costs of not supporting such policies (e.g. increased prison population, poorly-educated workers and voters) are greater than the short-term cost of supporting them. A friend of mine once referred to me as a bleeding-heart libertarian, and I can't exactly deny that somewhat strange characterization.

As a side note, I've spent some time trying to figure out New Mexico's School Grading Formula.