Alan "Al" Lynn Davis is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and researcher, a professor of computer science at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

, and served as the associate director of the

University of Utah School of Computing The School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. School of Computing The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science. The school has major research ...

. Davis was raised in

Salt Lake City, Utah Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the Capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Utah, most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the county seat, seat of Salt Lake County, Utah, Sal ...

. He received a bachelor's degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

in 1969, and a Ph.D. in computer science under

Bob Barton Robert Wilbur Barton (July 30, 1941 – January 15, 2018) was an American professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as a catcher from 1965 to 1974 for the San Francisco Giants, San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds. B ...

at Utah in 1972. With Bob Barton, in cooperation between

Burroughs Corporation The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many ...

and Utah, Davis built the first operational dataflow or "data driven" computing machine, the DDM-1, between 1972 and 1976. In the early 1980s, Davis left his tenured professor position at Utah to work for

Schlumberger Schlumberger Limited (), doing business as SLB, is an oilfield services company. Schlumberger has four principal executive offices located in Paris, Houston, London, and The Hague. Schlumberger is the world's largest offshore drilling compa ...

Palo Alto Research, where he headed the computer architecture group and developed the "FAIM-1" architecture. In 1988 he joined

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

labs in Palo Alto, where with Ken Stevens and Bill Coates he developed the "post office" switching architecture, a widely cited project. He returned to the

where he served as director of graduate studies in 2001 and as associate director since 2003, and has continued to do research with companies such as

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and

. Davis is mainly known for his work in

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...

and

asynchronous circuit Asynchronous circuit (clockless or self-timed circuit) is a sequential digital logic circuit that does not use a global clock circuit or signal generator to synchronize its components. Instead, the components are driven by a handshaking circuit ...

s, including influential work on arbiters. He has numerous technical publications and has supervised numerous Ph.D. dissertations.

References

External links

Al Davis home page
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people MIT School of Engineering alumni University of Utah alumni University of Utah faculty {{US-compu-bio-stub