Jack B. Dennis

Biography

A summary of my professional career may be found here. In 2004 I wrote an essay on my career in computer architecture for a book celebrating the 50th aniversary of the MIT Class of 1953. I was invited to give a keynote presentation at the 2004 Boston Area Computer Archtecture workshop. My presentation reviewed my experiences in computer architecture and discussed new directions for evolution of the field.

Research: The Fresh Breeze Project

The Fresh Breeze project is what I call my effort to apply what I have learned and observed in computer architecture to the design of a multiprocessor chip. Some papers related to the project are A parallel program execution model supporting modular software construction, presented at a 1997 workshop on Massively Parallel Programming Models, which discusses the motivating ideas of the project, and A multiprocessor chip architecture guided by modular programming principles, which reports on my vision of the architecture of the Fresh Breeze multiprocessor chip as of 2002.

In September 2005 an NSF research grant was awarded to support the development of a cycle-accurate simulator to model and evaluate the Fresh Breeze multi-core architecture. During the summer of 2006, students built a GUI as a tool for running and testing the simulator and a translator for generating machine code for the simulator from Java bytecode files was completed. We are currently using these tools to check out operation of the simulator. Several simple programs have been run successfully and the project is working toward running meaningful program examples including multithread programs in the summer of 2007. The multithread programming model for the Fresh Breeze architecture has evolved significantly and is described in a recent paper, The Fresh Breeze Model of Thread Execution.