Michael O'Sullivan

Biography

Mike O'Sullivan's academic career commenced with a BSc in Mathematics at The University of Auckland. He continued on with a MPhil in Operations Research, then left New Zealand to pursue a Master of Science at Stanford in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research, followed by a PhD in Management Science and Engineering on “New Methods for Dynamic Programming over an Infinite Time Horizon”.

Mike worked throughout his study. While at The University of Auckland, he worked as a junior lecturer and as a software engineer. When he went to Stanford, he worked as a Research Assistant in the Department of EESOR (Stanford), as a Software Engineer at McGraw-Hill, and as a Research Consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

On completing his PhD, Mike returned to New Zealand to take up a position as Lecturer with the Department of Engineering Science, and continued to consult for Hewlett-Packard for another two years.

Mike has been working on storage area networks (SANs) for over 10 years, and has developed algorithms for large-scale SAN design. He has also built an innovative storage architecture (on prototype storage systems) that implements the SAN designs from his optimization algorithms.

His current focus is the use of Operations Research in cloud computing infrastructure (particularly storage) and for improving health delivery services. He is co-founder of the ORUA research group (twiki.esc.auckland.ac.nz/twiki/bin/view/ORUA/WebHome).
 

Qualifications

PhD in Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, USA
MS in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research, Stanford University, USA
MPhil in Operations Research, The University of Auckland
BSc in Mathematics, The University of Auckland
 

Research interests

• Operations Research for Information and Communicatons Technology
• Operations Research for Healthcare Services
• Tools for Operations Research Computation

Research groups

• ORUA
   

Teaching

• ENGSCI 213 - Mathematical Modelling 2SE
• ENGSCI 313 - Mathematical Modelling 3ECE
• ENGSCI 355 - Applied Modelling in Simulation and Optimisation
• ENGSCI 761 - Computational Optimisation in Operations Research
• ENGSCI 768 - Research Topics in Operations Research 1

(This is a current list, but not comprehensive)
 

Selected publications

O'Sullivan MJ, Saunders MA, Stabilizing policy improvement for large-scale infinite-horizon dynamic programming, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications 31(2):434-459 2009

Walker CG, O'Sullivan MJ, Core-Edge design of storage area networks-A Single-edge formulation with problem-specific cuts, Computers and Operations Research 37(5):916-926 2010

O'Sullivan MJ, Lim Q-S, Walker CG, Dunning I, Mitchell S, Dippy - a simplified interface for advanced mixed-integer programming, Report 685, University of Auckland Faculty of Engineering, Auckland, New Zealand, February 2011 (Updated Jan 2012)

Lee D, O'Sullivan M, Walker C, Benchmarking and modeling disk-based storage tiers for practical storage design, PMBS'11 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Performance Modeling, Benchmarking and Simulation of High Performance Computing Systems, Co-located with SC'11 21-22 2011

Administration

• Faculty of Engineering ITSMP committee
• Academic Editor foe DES website