Karen L. Karavanic, Ph.D.
Professor
Computer Science Department
Portland State University
Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science

How to Reach Me
Research
Helpful notes for Students ( Why I am an Academic )
Recent Professional Service

What Fuels Me?

I hold a B.A. in Computer Science from New York University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. At Wisconsin I worked with the Paradyn Performance Tools Group under the direction of Prof. Barton Miller; I was the recipient of a Wisconsin Foundation Fellowship and a NASA GSRP Fellowship.

My research is in diagnosing and characterizing the runtime performance of large-scale systems and applications. This includes power, cooling, and security as well as more traditional aspects such as execution time. My particular focus is on a holistic view that includes performance factors external to the application under study, such as resource contention, power constraints, OS interference, and the overhead of security mechanisms. We are currently developing performance diagnosis techniques for a common type of HPC applications called Holistic HPC Workflows. These are applications comprising multiple separable codes, possibly run on different platforms, that have not been developed within a workflow management environment. We are also currently focused on continuous security monitoring for large-scale commercial server environments such as clouds. I have collaborated with scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and New Mexico Consortium.

I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in operating systems; Introduction to Security; Introduction to Performance Measurement, Modeling and Analysis; and Accelerated (GPU) Computing. I am not currently teaching since I am on an IPA assignment to the U.S. Government.

I am currently serving the nation as a Program Director in the CISE/CNS Division of the National Science Foundation.

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things."
-- Admiral Grace Hopper, Computer Pioneer