About Metrica Labs Pty Ltd

Location

Metrica Labs Pty Ltd is in the Sydney, Australia Surry Hills / Redfern area. Metrica began in 1995 in Portland, Oregon, with the purpose of providing a range of high-tech project and system analysis serivces to the computer industry, primarily in the San Jose area of California. Greg Baran, the founder, relocated with his family to Sydney in 2004, taking Metrica Labs along.

Principal and Founder

Gregory Baran, PhD

Greg has worked with Metrica Labs since its inception in 1995 as business and technical director. Some Metrica projects are listed below.

Previously, he worked in the Intel Architecture Development Labs as the primary performance engineer and manager, being involved in the development of PCI and several generations of CPU and memory design including Pentium Pro. He has also worked at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA, and at Sun Microsystems as a manager of operating system development. Earlier technical positions included IBM Research, Bell Laboratories, and NASA. He received his PhD from Columbia University in New York in Astronomy.

Some Previous Clients and Projects

Pluris

Pluris, an IP router star designed and built a range of terabit IP network router equipment for telco back office use. Metrica designed, implemented, and applied a detailed, but fast traffic modeling system. They needed to know how to configure their subsystems for best results. It was written in C++ and reasonably large (30k lines).

NetFrame

Provided support for the design of the architecture of high-end server systems. Result was a 10x improvement in system throughput over unoptimized systems.

Veritas

Provided a suite of testing tools and specification of procedures for file subsystems.

Maxtor

Provided test methodology and tools to characterize disk performance and behavior under load. Result of this work was the movement of Maxtor from the back of the pack in disk performance to one of the leaders.

HP

Analyzed a proposed print server architecture in advance of construction.

Virtutech

Wrote a set of key technical marketing documents describing the theory and application of their simulation technology that permits the execution of real OS and application binary code in a sophisticated software interpreter.

Intel, Adaptec, 3Com and other PCI Integrated Circuit Product Designers

Metrica designed, built, and marketed a series of PCI bus tracing very high-speed memory subsystems that captured every hardware bus transaction for analysis and replay in simulations. The tracer systems are still being developed and produced for Intel, evolving presently into CPU chip design support systems. These traces are used to drive CPU chip design simulators.