Hill, Mark D.

Home : Faculty :
Mark D. Hill

Mark D. Hill
Professor

>>> Personal Homepage <<<

Contact Information

6373 Computer Sciences and Statistics
1210 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53706

Tel: 608/262-2196
E-mail: markhill@cs.wisc.edu

Departments

Education

B.S.E. (Computer Engineering) University of Michigan, 1981
M.S. Computer Science, University of California - Berkeley, 1983
Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California - Berkeley, 1987

Fields of Interest

computer architecture
performance evaluation
computer memory system design
parallel computing

Selected Publications

A New Page Table for 64-bit Address Spaces, Madhusudhan Talluri, Mark D. Hill, Yousef A. Khalidi, Symposium on Operating Systems Principals (SOSP), December 1995.
Presidential Young Investigator Award Final Report, Mark D. Hill, July 1995.
Tempest: A Substrate for Portable Parallel Programs, Mark D. Hill, James R. Larus, David A. Wood (Compcon, March 1995).

Summary

My research targets the memory systems of shared-memory multiprocessors and high-performance uniprocessors. Memory system design is important, because it largely determines a computer's sustained performance. My work emphasizes quantitative analysis (often requiring new evaluation techniques) of system-level (not just hardware) performance.

Much of my recent work is part of the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel Project with Profs. Larus and David A. Wood and many students. The project expects most future massively-parallel computers will be built from workstation-like nodes and programmed in high-level parallel languages--like HPF--that support a shared address space in which processes uniformly reference data. Our research seeks to develop a consensus about the middle-level interface--below languages and compilers and above system software and hardware. We have recently proposed the Tempest interface that enables programmers, compilers, and program libraries to implement and use message passing, transparent shared memory, and hybrid combinations of the two. We are developing Tempest implementations on a Thinking Machines CM-5, a cluster of workstations (COW), and hypothetical hardware platforms. The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel project is so named because we use our tools to cull the design space of parallel supercomputers in a manner similar to how aeronautical engineers use conventional wind tunnels to design airplanes.

Other recent work with Madhu Talluri targets improving translation lookaside buffer (TLB) and page table performance by clustering aligned groups of base pages. Options require changes to hardware only (complete-subblocked TLBs), operating system only (clustered page tables), or both (superpages and partial-subblocked TLBs).

Copyright 2005 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Date last modified: Wednesday, 11-Nov-1998 12:23:29 CST
Content by: markhill@cs.wisc.edu

UW-Madison : COE : ECE : ECE Site Map

UPDATE PROFILE