Speed does matter....especially in case of Computers

My thesis topic at Clemson subsumed "Peformance Analysis Framework for Coven". In simple words I had developed a software framework to understand (visualize) the performance of parallel programs running on Beowulf clusters. These programs were written using a component based language called Coven which was developed at the PARL lab in Clemson. Fortunately after school I got a job as Performance Engineer at NetApp and I am basically involved in engineering projects that improve the performance of the storage appliance we develop. This implies working and analyzing lots of data using Microsoft Excel as well as GNUplot and then making the required changes to our OS and file system.

The current project that I am working on involves lots of analysis work instead of programming and I am really loving it. However I have realized that I lack the knowledge of advanced mathematical tools which would give me a deeper understanding of what is going on. Hence I plan to study the following concepts in the coming few days

1) Fundamentals of Probability (Just a quick brush up)
2) Markov chains (Had learnt this but have completely forgotten)
3) Queuing concepts (M/M/1 etc)

Hopefully will be fun. Also to make this learning interesting I plan to write some scripts that will make use of this newly acquired knowledge.