Her research is in the area of performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications. Currently, she is focused on the areas of performance analysis, power analysis and resiliency.
Valerie Taylor is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.
Dr. Taylor's research interests include performance of parallel scientific applications, computer architecture, and visual supercomputing environments. In 1993 she received the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award. She was awarded a patent for her dissertation work related to computer architecture for scientific computing. In 1994 she was a member of one of eight teams selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new ultra-fast computers known as "petaflop" computers, which will perform 1,000 times faster than the teraflop, or one trillion operations per second, computers in use today. The petaflop computer will employs a hierarchical architecture, using off-the-shelf processors with different speeds. At the top are a few processors that are very fast. Moving "down" the structure are many more parallel processors, but of slower speed for cost-efficiency. The goal is to design the system so that the processors all work together at these nearly inconceivable speeds.