Computer Sciences Dept.

Mark D. Hill

Professor of Computer Sciences and
Electrical and Computer Engineering

2006 Photo of Mark D. Hill by Bob Rashid
By Bob Rashid in 2006
Research Interests: Computer architecture, parallel computing, memory systems, and performance evaluation.

Teaching Interests: Computer engineering (CS/ECE 252), computer organization (354 and 552), computer architecture (752), parallel computer architecture (757), and topic courses (758 and 838).

Ph.D.: (Computer Science) University of California - Berkeley, 1987.

Short Biography: Mark D. Hill (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill) is professor in both the computer sciences department and the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where he also co-leads the Wisconsin Multifacet (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/) project with David Wood. His research interests include parallel computer system design, memory system design, computer simulation, and recently transactional memory. He earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Longer Biography: Mark D. Hill (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill) is Professor in both the Computer Sciences Department and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.

Dr. Hill's research targets computer design and evaluation. He has made contributions to parallel computer system design (e.g., memory consistency models and cache coherence), memory system design (caches and translation buffers), computer simulation (parallel systems and memory systems), software (e.g., page tables and cache-conscious optimizations for databases and pointer-based codes) and recently transactional memory. For example, he is the inventor of the widely-used 3C model of cache behavior (compulsory, capacity, and conflict misses).

Hill's current research is mostly part of the Wisconsin Multifacet Project that seeks to improve the multiprocessor servers that form the computational infrastructure for Internet web servers, databases, and other demanding applications. The Multifacet work focuses on using the transistor bounty provided by Moore's Law to improve multiprocessor performance, cost, and fault tolerance, while also making these systems easier to design and program.

Hill was named an ACM Fellow (2004) for contributions to memory consistency models and memory system design and a Fellow of the IEEE (2000) for contributions to cache memory design and analysis. He was awarded the ACM SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award in 2009, was named a Wisconsin Vilas Associate in 2006, co-won the best paper award in VLDB 2001, was named a Wisconsin Romnes Fellow in 1997, and won an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award in 1989. He co-edited Readings in Computer Architecture in 2000, is co-inventor of over 30 United States patents (several of which have been co-issued in the European Union & Japan), and was an ACM SIGARCH Director (1993-2007). He is co-author of five papers selected by IEEE Micro Top Picks (from 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007a, & 2007b). He has held visiting positions at Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya (2002-03) and Sun Microsystems (1995-96). Dr. Hill earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California - Berkeley in 1987, an M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1983, and a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in 1981.

 
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