Summary
In summary, the key to our work was (1) we took a
more programmer-centric view of the problem com-
pared to the more prevalent hardware-centric view at
that time, and (2) our persistence in seeking the mini-
mal possible constraints for the hardware interface. This
resulted in our redefining the problem in programmer-
centric terms, enabling a better understanding of some
of the fundamental issues. It is perhaps worth noting
that when we began this work, the problem seemed
deceptively simple, and a highly respected senior col-
league actually warned us that we were getting into
what appeared to be a closed area!
Acknowledgments
We thank those acknowledged in the original paper
and Jim Goodman who we regrettably omitted. We
thank the sponsors of this research for the confidence
they showed in a new professor: Michael Foster and
Zeke Zalcstein of the National Science Foundation, Rae
McLellan of Bell Labs, Chuck Thacker then of DEC,
Doug Johnson of TI, Chris Hsiung then of Cray, and the
University of Wisconsin Graduate School. We want to
especially note the acceleration brought to our careers
by the NSF’s Presidential Young Investigator program.
Biographies
Sarita V. Adve continued work on memory consis-
tency models for her Ph.D. thesis, under the supervision
of Mark Hill and supported by an IBM graduate fellow-
ship. She joined Rice University as an assistant profes-
sor in 1993, where she has worked on techniques to
improve and evaluate the performance of shared-mem-
ory systems. She received an NSF CAREER award in
1995, an IBM Partnership award in 1997, and an Alfred
P. Sloan research fellowship in 1998.
Mark D. Hill continued research on memory con-
sistency models, large caches, translation lookaside
buffers, and page tables. With Professors James R.
Larus and David A. Wood, he co-founded the Wiscon-
sin Wind Tunnel project that has developed new meth-
ods and new designs for parallel computer systems.
After earning tenure, Hill went on sabbatical to Sun
Microsystems where he worked on high-end servers.
Hill is now Professor and Romnes Fellow at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison, Information Director of
ACM SIGARCH, and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
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