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Institute Affiliation:
Contact Information:
Phone:
858-534-1743
Email:
swanson@cs.ucsd.edu
Personal Home Page
Research Page
| | Steven Swanson - Assistant Professor
Unconventional processor architectures that require novel approaches to problems such as performance, power, and
programmability.
Steven Swanson is a highly respected experimental computer architect. While working on his Ph.D. at the
University of Washington, he developed WaveScalar, a dataflow processor architecture that avoids the scaling and
complexity problems of conventional von Neumann processors, while solving the dataflow memory ordering problem of
previous dataflow machines. As a result, dataflow processing is now a viable alternative to the von Neumann execution
that dominates currently available processors. WaveScalar's ability to extract parallelism at many levels within a
single application while supporting familiar memory semantics provides an opportunity to accelerate computer
performance independent of underlying technology scaling trends. In developing WaveScalar, professor Swanson also
developed new techniques that allow programmers to express sophisticated information to the processor, allowing it to
perform some operations 100s of times faster than conventional systems. Currently, he is developing techniques for
refining the architecture's interactions with programming languages, software engineering, and technology constraints
to make it easier to build high-performance, power-efficient computing systems that are scalable and easy to
maintain.
Capsule Bio:
Steven Swanson is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of
Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2006 and
a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Puget Sound in 1999. At UCSD,
Swanson teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in computer architecture, machine organization, and hardware/software
interfaces. He also trains graduate students in computer architecture with emphasis on its interaction with software
system components. Swanson received graduate research fellowships from both the National Science Foundation (1999) and
Intel (2002).
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