Al Davis
Professor & Director
School of Computing
University of Utah
Nerd
DirtBiker
Skier
Whacko
- Work Address:
- Al Davis
- School of Computing
- 50 S. Campus Drive, Room 3190
- Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-9205
- Voice: (801) 581-3991
- Fax: (801) 581-5843
- Email: my id_name is ald and my email is
id_name@cs.utah.edu
Potential Graduate Students (please read)
I no longer answer direct email from students expressing
interest in our graduate program, or about my interest in supporting you
if you decide to come here to study. There are just too many
requests for me to answer individually. If you are qualified, you
should apply. If you get accepted and show prowess in a research area then you'll get supported.
Matching interests and exploring a research fit in my area will happen
after you are here. There is a button to the department's
web page at the bottom of this page, click on it and you can find
on-line application materials as well as detailed information on our
program and the associated requirements.
Current Research Interests
Traditionally I have worked in the areas of high performance computer
architecture, asynchronous circuits and systems, VLSI, embedded
systems, domain specific hardware accelerator synthesis tools, and
parallel
computation. While I still maintain an interest in these
disciplines, my current research focus is on energy efficient
architectures, main memory interfaces and microarchitecture,
warehouse-scale interconnection networks, hardware support for
high-performance ray tracing, and silicon nanophotonics. The
silicon nanophotonics work is in collaboration with colleagues at HP
Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA.
I am part of the Utah Architecture Group
(a.k.a. Utah Arch) - follow this link to a description of current
projects, publications, etc. The publications that can be found
here cover my current research interests at Utah.

Course Materials
In the recent
past I have taught embedded systems (CS 5780), computer architecture
(CS 6810), and computer systems (CS 4400). Current course
materials for these courses can be found at
http://www.eng.utah.edu/~csxxxx - where xxxx is the appropriate course
number.
Now, as Director of the School of Computing, I am only teaching the computer engineering senior project courses: CS 3992 & CS 4710
Selected Other Recent Publications (which don't also appear in Utah Arch)
J-H Ahn, N. Binkert, A. Davis, M. McLaren, N. Muralimanohar. The
Role of Optics in High-Radix Switch Design. To appear in ISCA
2011.
J-H
Ahn, R. G. Beausoleil, N. Binkert, A. Davis, M. Fiorentino, N. P.
Jouppi, M. McLaren, M. Monchiero, N. Muralimanohar, R. S. Schreiber, D.
Vantrease. CMOS Nanophotonics: Technology, System Implications,
and a CMP Case Study. Chapter 9 in Low Power Networks on Chip, Springer, October 2010.
G. B. P. Bezerra, S. Forrest, M. Moses, A. Davis, P. Zarkesh-Ha.
Energy Prediction in NOC using Rent's Rule Communication
Probability Distribution. SLIP, June 2010.
N. Binkert, A. Davis, M. Lipasti, R. S. Schreiber, D. Vantrease. Nanophotonic Barriers. PICA, December 2009.
J-H Ahn, N. Binkert, A. Davis, M. McLaren, R. S. Schreiber.
HyperX: Topology, Routing, and Packaging of Efficient Large-Scale
Networks. Supercomputing, November 2009.
J-H Ahn, M. Fiorentino, R. G. Beaausoleil, N. Binkert, A. Davis, D.
Fattal, N. P. Jouppi, M. McLaren, C. M. Santori, R. S. Schreiber, S. M.
Spillane, D. Vantrease, Q. Xu. Devices and architectures for
photonic chip-scale integration. Journal of Applied Physics A,
Vol. 95(4), June 2009.
K. Ramani, C. Gribble, A. Davis. StreamRay: A Stream Filtering
Architecture for Coherent Ray Tracing. ASPLOS, March 2009.
M. Moses, S. Forrest, A. Davis, J.H. Brown, M. Lodder. Scaling Theory
for Information Networks. Journal of the Royal Socieity Interface,
Vol. 5(29), December 2008.
R. G. Beausoleil, J-H Ahn, N. Binkert, A. Davis, D. Fattal, M.
Fiorentino, N. P. Jouppi, M. McLaren, C. M. Santori, R. S. Schreiber,
S. M. Spillane, D. Vantrease, Q. Xu. A Nanophotonic Interconnect
for High-Performance Many-Core Computation. Hot Interconnects,
Aug. 2008.
D.
Vantrease, R. S. Schreiber, M. Monchiero, M. McLaren, N. P. Jouppi, M.
Fiorentino, A. Davis, N. Binkert, R. G. Beausoleil, J-H Ahn.
Corona: System Implications of Emerging Nanophotonic Technology.
ISCA, June 2008.
K. Ramani, A. Davis. Application Driven Embedded System Design.
A Face Recognition Case Study. CASES, October 2007.
Selected
Older Publications
L. Schelicke, A. Davis. Design Trade-Offs for User Level I/O
Architectures. IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 55(8), August
2006.
A. Ibrahim, A. Davis, M. Parker. ACT: A Low-Power VLIW Co-Processor for DSP Applications. CODESS, July 2005.
B. Mathew, A. Davis. A Low-Power Architecture for Embedded Perception. CASES, October 2004.
A.
Davis, U. Prestor. An Application Centric
CC-Numa Profiler. Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on
Workload Characterization IV, December 2001.
A. Davis,
Lamber Schaelicke, Sally McKee.
Profiling Interrupts in Modern Architectures. Proceedings of
the Eighth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
of Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS-2000), IEEE CS
Press, pp. 70-79, August 2000.
A. Davis,
B.K. Mathew, S.A. McKee, J.B. Carter. Design of a Parallel Vector Access Unit.
Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on High Performance
Computer Architecture (HPCA-6), pp. 39-48, January 2000.
A. Davis,
B.K. Mathew, S.A. McKee, J.B. Carter. Algorithmic
Foundations for a Parallel Vector Access Memory System.
Proceedings of the 12th ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and
Architectures, July 2000.
A. Davis, J.B.
Carter, W.C. Hsieh, L.B. Stoller, M.R. Swanson, L. Zhang, S. A.
McKee. Impulse: Building a Smarter Memory
Controller. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium
on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA-5), pp. 70-79, January
1999.
A. Davis, J. Carter, W. Hsieh, M. Swanson, L. Zhang,
M. Parker, L. Schaelicke, L. Stoller, T. Tateyama. Memory System Support for Irregular Applications.
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and
Run-time Systems for Scalable Computers. May 1998.
A. Davis, M.
Swanson, M. Parker. Efficient Communication
Mechanisms for Cluster Based Parallel Computing. Springer-Verlag
Lecture Notes in Computer Science #1199, pp. 1-15, Feb. 1997.
A. Davis, Steven M.
Nowick. An Introduction to
Asynchronous Circuit Design. University of Utah Technical Report,
UUCS-97-013, September 1997. [A version of this report appears in the
Encyclopedia of Computer Science.]
A. Davis, Synthesizing Asynchronous Circuits: Practice and
Experience. Modern Asynchronous Design Practice, Springer-Verlag Workshops in Computer Science, Chapter 3, pp. 104 - 150, edited by A.
Davis and G. Birtwistle). April 1995.
A. Davis, B. Coates, K. Stevens. Automatic Synthesis of Fast Compact
Self-Timed Control Circuits. Proceedings of the IFIP Working
Conference on Asynchronous Design Methodologies. Manchester, England;
April 1993, pp. 193--208.
A. Davis, B. Coates, K. Stevens. The Post Office Experience: designing a
large asynchronous chip. Integration Vol. 15, No. 3, November 1993,
pp. 341-366.
School of Computing Homepage