Academic work is never done in a vaccuum, and I owe thanks to several
people whose advice and feedback have been invaluable over the course
of the work described in this dissertation.

First, and most obviously, I owe a lot to Dr. Dong Xie for serving as
my advisor.  We haven't always seen eye to eye on what the appropriate
priorities of this work should be, and he has been very patient in the
face of my grumbling.  While this project branched out into something
far larger than the mere journal extension to his SIRS paper that he
had originally envisioned, the original idea that spawned this line of
work was entirely his.

Other academic collegues that are deserving of mention here are
Dr. Ryan Stutsman, whose advice on techniques for representing tail
latency distributions was absolutely critical to the work described in
Chapter~\ref{chap:tail-latency}, Dr. Jeff Philips, who collaborated with
my advisor on grant writing pertinent to this project, and Dr. Zhuoyue
Zhao, who collaborated directly with us on the work that ultimately
became Chapter~\ref{chap:framework}. Chapter~\ref{chap:design-space}
has been influenced, in part, by conversations with Dr. Niv Dayan.

I also owe thanks to several of my fellow PhD students.  The fact that
this document is even vaguely coherent is due in large part to Julia
Custatis's attention to detail. Maxwell Norfolk and Jinyu Liu (as well
as Julia) all got to suffer through being used as sounding boards for
various assortments of my harebrained ideas. Along those same lines,
Dr. Jack Sampson was instrumental to the maintenance of my sanity over
these past few years.

Thanks everyone. I could have never done this without you.