Arnold Oral Allen (died 2004) was an American instructor, public speaker, and writer who worked at
IBM and
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
, and specialized in the analysis and
mathematical modelling of
computer performance.
Biography
Allen earned a Ph.D. in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
at
UCLA in 1962 under
Angus Taylor with a dissertation entitled ''Banach and Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions'', where he later lectured. At IBM, he taught at the Information Systems Management Institute in
Los Angeles, California. Later, at Hewlett-Packard, he was a member of the Performance Technology Center, then a researcher at the Advanced Technology Group in
Roseville, California.
Allen was elected as a director of the
Computer Measurement Group (CMG), and selected to be the keynote speaker at two international conferences. He was an invited speaker at the ''Sixth International Conference on Modelling Techniques and Tools for Computer Performance Evaluation'', held in
Edinburgh, Scotland in September 1992.
In 1994, he received the Computer Measurement group's
A. A. Michelson award for technical excellence and professional contributions as a teacher and inspirer of others.
Work
Allen is most well known as the author of the book, ''Probability, Statistics, and Queueing Theory with Computer Science Applications''. Originally published in 1978, and still in print in 2007, it is widely used as a university textbook, by practitioners of computer performance analysis, and by those wishing to apply
probability,
statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...
and
queueing theory techniques to solve problems in other fields, such as
operations research,
management science,
engineering, and
physics.
At IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Allen's students were typically
systems engineer
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking p ...
s and project managers, not computer scientists. He encouraged them to improve upon the informal approaches to computer performance analysis that were (and still are) in common use, applying more
formal methods and using mathematical models to predict how the performance of a computer system would behave as workloads increased. He began his 1994 book, Computer Performance Analysis with Mathematica, with this observation:
He concluded the book by quoting
George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man".
[
] Allen commented, ''"I hope the reader fits Shaw's definition of unreasonable, and wants to change things for the better"''.
Publications
*1978. ''Probability, statistics, and queueing theory : with computer science applications''
*1994. ''Introduction to computer performance analysis with Mathematica''.
*1996. ''Mathematica CD-ROM library''
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Allen, Arnold
People in information technology
American operations researchers
University of California, Los Angeles alumni