Alan L. Davis

For other people named Al Davis, see Al Davis (disambiguation).
Al Davis
Davis in the Nevada desert, November 2007
Born
Salt Lake City, Utah
Alma materMIT
University of Utah
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsUniversity of Utah
Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Hewlett-Packard
Thesis SPL: A Structured Programming Language  (1972)
Doctoral advisorRobert S. Barton

Alan "Al" Lynn Davis is an American computer scientist and researcher, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and served as the associate director of the University of Utah School of Computing.

Davis was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1969, and a Ph.D. in computer science under Bob Barton at Utah in 1972.[1]

With Bob Barton, in cooperation between Burroughs Corporation and Utah, Davis built the first operational dataflow or "data driven" computing machine, the DDM-1, between 1972 and 1976.[2]

In the early 1980s, Davis left his tenured professor position at Utah to work for Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, where he headed the computer architecture group and developed the "FAIM-1" architecture.[3] In 1988 he joined Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, where with Ken Stevens and Bill Coates he developed the "post office" switching architecture, a widely cited project.[4]

He returned to the University of Utah School of Computing where he served as director of graduate studies in 2001[5] and as associate director since 2003,[6] and has continued to do research with companies such as Intel[7] and Hewlett-Packard.[8]

Davis is mainly known for his work in computer architecture and asynchronous circuits, including influential work on arbiters.[9] He has numerous technical publications and has supervised numerous Ph.D. dissertations.

  1. ^ "Computer Architecture Seminar Abstracts: Spring 2002". U. T. Austin Computer Architecture Seminar. Retrieved 2009-02-24.
  2. ^ Joseph D. Dumas II (2006). Computer Architecture. CRC Press. p. 322. ISBN 978-0-8493-2749-0.
  3. ^ W. Bibel; et al. (1987). "Parallel Inference Machine". In Philip C. Treleaven and Marco Vanneschi (ed.). Future Parallel Computers. Springer. p. 216. ISBN 978-3-540-18203-0.
  4. ^ K. W. Bolding and L. Snyder (1994). "Network Fault Detection and Recovery in the Chaos Router". In Gary M. Koob and Clifford Lau (ed.). Foundations of Dependable Computing. Springer. p. 85. ISBN 978-0-585-28002-8.
  5. ^ "22 New Graduate Students join School of Computing" (PDF). The Utah Teapot. Fall 2001. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-07-06.
  6. ^ Thomas Hendersonby (Summer 2003). "Auf Wiedersehen!" (PDF). The Utah Teapot. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-07-06.
  7. ^ "Intel Published Articles Published in or about Q3, 2006". Intel Technology Journal.
  8. ^ "Three-dimensional memory module architectures". United States Patent Application 20090103345. 2009.
  9. ^ Kees van Berkel (1993). Handshake Circuits. Cambridge University Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-521-45254-0.