Teaching Interests

I prefer to teach courses that are related to the implementation and realization of a computer system. I have always found the most interesting courses to be those that explained how something works that one has used in some manner, but never completely understood. For instance, all CS students have used a compiler. But until taking a compiler course, a student never really understands the process of translating a source program to machine code.

Courses Taught Recently

• Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling
• Advanced Topics in Compilation
• Programming Languages
• Computer Architecture
• Assembly Language Programming
• Computer Organization
• Computer Science I
• Unix Tools
• Computer Organization I
• Computer Organization II

Students Advised (ordered by graduation date)

• Frank Mueller
  • "Avoiding Unconditional Jumps by Code Replication"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 1991
  • became PhD student in CS department at FSU
• Indradev Kadidal
  • "Design and Implementation of an ANSI Lint Based MIPS C Front End"
  • defended MS Project in Summer 1992
  • first employment: Unify Corporation in Sacramento
• Jeffrey Snyder
  • "Fast Context Switches"
  • defended MS thesis in Spring 1992
  • first employment: Casi-Ruscl Corporation in Coral Springs
• Dan Warner
  • "Combining the Advantages of Direct-Mapped and Set-Associative Instruction Cache Organizations"
  • first employment: Encore Corporation in Miami
  • defended MS thesis in Fall 1992
• Mickey Boyd
  • "Graphical Visualization of Compiler Optimizations"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 1993
  • first employment: the systems administrator for the Math Dept at FSU
• Syauchen Baker
  • "Instruction Reorganization for LIW Machines"
  • defended MS project in Summer 1993
  • first employment: systems administrator for the CS Dept at FAMU
• Frank Mueller
  • "Static Cache Simulation and Its Applications"
  • defended PhD disseration in Summer 1994
  • first employment: faculty member at Humboldt University in Berlin
  • current employment: associate professor at North Carolina State University
• Lo Ko
  • "Supporting User-Friendly Analysis of Timing Constraints"
  • defended MS project in Spring 1995
  • first employment: Florida Department of Insurance in Tallahassee
• Chris Healy
  • "Predicting Pipeline and Instruction Cache Performance"
  • defended MS thesis in Fall 1995
  • became PhD student in CS department at FSU
• Rob Arnold
  • "Bounding Instruction Cache Performance"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 1996
  • first employment: Peak Traffic in Tallahassee
• Emily Ratliff
  • "Decreasing Process Memory Requirements by Overlapping Run-Time Stack Data"
  • defended MS thesis in Spring 1997
  • first employment: IBM in Fort Lauderdale
• Randy White
  • "Bounding Worst-Case Data Cache Performance"
  • defended PhD disseration in Spring 1997
  • first employment: Internet Service Providers in Tallahassee
• Peter Zhang
  • "Avoiding Conditional Branches by Code Replication and Interprocedural Analysis"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 1997
  • first employment: General Electric in Charlottesville, Virginia
• Richard Bowman
  • "Decreasing Process Memory Requirements by Overlapping Instructions"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 1997
  • first employment: Harris in Melbourne, Florida
• Nagham Al-Yaqoubi
  • "Reducing Timing Analysis Complexity by Partitioning Control Flow"
  • defended MS project in Summer 1997
  • first employment: Raytheon in Boston, Massachusetts
• Gang-Ryung Uh
  • "Effectively Exploiting Indirect Jumps"
  • defended PhD dissertation in Fall 1997
  • first employment: Lucent Technologies in Allentown, Pennsylvania
  • current employment: faculty member at Boise State University
• Minghui Yang
  • "Improving Performance by Branch Reordering"
  • defended MS thesis in Spring 1998
  • first employment: Oracle in San Jose, California
• Chris Healy
  • "Automatic Utilization of Constraints for Timing Analysis"
  • defended PhD dissertation in Summer 1999
  • first employment: faculty member at Furman University
• Yuhong Wang
  • "Interprocedural Optimizations for Embedded Systems"
  • defended MS project in Summer 1999
  • first employment: American LegalNet in Los Angeles
• Apan Qasem
  • "Using a Swap Instruction to Coalesce Loads and Stores"
  • defended MS thesis in Spring 2001
  • became PhD student in CS at Rice University
• Baosheng Cai
  • "Compiler Modifications to Support Interactive Compilation"
  • defended MS thesis in Spring 2001
  • first employment: Oracle in San Jose, California
• Wankang Zhao
  • "VISTA: Vpo Interactive System for Tuning Applications"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 2001
  • became PhD student in CS at FSU
• Prasad Kulkarni
  • "Performance Driven Optimization Tuning in VISTA"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 2003
  • became PhD student in CS at FSU
• Stephen Hines
  • "Using De-optimization to Re-optimize Code"
  • defended MS thesis in Summer 2004
  • became PhD student in CS at FSU
• R. Clint Whaley
  • "Automatic Empirical Optimization of High Performance Floating Point Kernels"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Fall 2004
  • first employment: Asst. Prof. at University of Texas at San Antonio
• William Kreahling
  • "Reducing the Cost of Comparisons within Conditional Transfers of Control"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Summer 2005
  • first employment: Asst. Prof. at Western Carolina University
• Wankang Zhao
  • "Reducing the WCET of Applications on Low End Embedded Systems"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Summer 2005
  • first employment: Datamaxx Corporation
• Mark Searles (co-directed with Gary Tyson)
  • "Effective Exploitation of a Large Data Register File"
  • defended MS Thesis in Fall 2006
  • first employment: Sun Microsystems
• Christopher Zimmer (co-directed with Gary Tyson)
  • "Application Reconfigurable Processors"
  • defended MS Thesis in Fall 2006
  • became PhD student in CS at NCSU
• Kelley Jones (co-directed with Gary Tyson)
  • "Graphical Visualization of Architectural Simulators"
  • defended MS Thesis in Spring 2007
  • first employment: Harris Corportation
• Prasad Kulkarni
  • "Fast and Effective Solutions to the Phase Ordering Problem"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Summer 2007
  • first employment: Asst. Prof. at University of Kansas
• Stephen Hines
  • "Improving Processor Efficiency through Enhanced Instruction Fetch"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Summer 2008
  • first employment: Research Scientist at Nvidia
• Nicholas Wallen
  • "Graduate Student Database"
  • defended MS Project in Fall 2008
  • first employment: software engineer at Publix
• Ian Finlayson
  • "Improving Processor Efficiency by Statically Pipelining Instructions"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Summer 2011
  • first employment: Asst. Prof. at Mary Washington University
• Peter Gavin
  • "A Presentation and Low-Level Energy Usage Analysis of Two Low-Power Architectural Techniques"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Fall 2014
  • first employment: Google
• Carlos Sanchez
  • "The Tagless Access Buffer: Improving Data Access Efficiency with Minimal ISA Changes"
  • defended MS Thesis in Fall 2015
  • first employment: ID Networks
• Ryan Baird
  • "Optimizing Transfers of Control in the Static Pipeline Architecture"
  • defended MS Thesis in Summer 2016
  • became PhD student in CS at FSU
• Victor Brunell
  • "Dependency Collapsing in Instruction-Level Parallel Architectures"
  • defended MS Thesis in Summer 2017
  • first employment: Homes.Com
• Michael Stokes
  • "Decoupling Address Generation from Loads and Stores"
  • defended MS Thesis in Spring 2018
  • first employment: MathWorks
• Luis Penagos
  • "DEEP: Dependency Elimination Using Early Predictions"
  • defended MS Thesis in Summer 2018
  • first employment: MathWorks
• Daniel Mock
  • "A Feasibility Study for Methods of Effective Memoization Optimization"
  • defended MS Project in Fall 2018
• Michael Stokes
  • "Techniques to Reduce Data Cache Access Energy Usage and Load Delay"
  • defended PhD Dissertation in Fall 2019
  • first employment: MathWorks
• Abigail Mortensen
  • "Isolating Errors for an Assembly Optimizer"
  • defended MS Thesis in Summer 2022
• Joseph Zilonka
  • "A Study on Loop Unrolling at the Assembly Code Level"
  • defended MS Thesis in Summer 2022
  • first employment: AMD in Orlando

Students Currently Advising

• Ryan Baird - PhD student
• Abigail Mortensen - PhD student
• Arthur Karapateas - MS student
• Joseph Zilonka - MS student