Richard Lewis Mattson (born May 29, 1935) is an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work on using memory trace data to simulate the performance of the

memory hierarchy In computer architecture, the memory hierarchy separates computer storage into a hierarchy based on response time. Since response time, complexity, and capacity are related, the levels may also be distinguished by their performance and controlli ...

. He developed the stack distance profile, and used it to model page misses in

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very l ...

systems as a function of the amount of real memory available. The same methods have been applied as well more recently for modeling the behavior of

CPU cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

s at lower levels of the memory hierarchy, and of

web cache A Web cache (or HTTP cache) is a system for optimizing the World Wide Web. It is implemented both client-side and server-side. The caching of multimedias and other files can result in less overall delay when browsing the Web. Parts of the syste ...

s for internet content. Mattson was born in

Greeley, Colorado Greeley is the home rule municipality city that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Weld County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,795 at the 2020 United States Census, an increase of 17.12% since the 2010 ...

. He graduated from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1957, with honors 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 ...

. He became a student of Bernard Widrow at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he completed his doctorate in 1962. His dissertation was ''The Analysis and Synthesis of Adaptive Systems Which Use Networks of Threshold Elements''. He then became a faculty member at Stanford himself, before moving to

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

in 1965. While at Stanford, he supervised two doctoral students,

John Hopcroft John Edward Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939) is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book) and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM P ...

and Yale Patt, both of whom themselves became notable computer scientists, and he has many academic descendants through both of them.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mattson, Richard Lewis 1935 births Living people People from Greeley, Colorado American computer scientists University of California, Berkeley alumni Stanford University alumni Stanford University faculty