Andrew D. Hilton

I'm somewhere in the middle of my fourth year as a PhD student here at UPenn. Originally, I was a Programming Languages student, however, I decided that computer architecture was more fun, and joined the Architecture and Compilers Group, with Amir Roth as my advisor. Before coming to Penn, I received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, where Olin Shivers was my advisor (he has since left Tech to go to NEU).

Research Interests/Publications

My first architecture paper was Ginger: Control Independence Using Tag Rewriting, in which we propose a way to exploit control independence in a more efficient manner than previous proposals. Ginger appeared in ISCA 2007.

Currently I'm doing some work on scalable load/store solutions for CPR/CFP processors, as well as some work on how to get single thread performance improvements in a CMP setting.

I also know a bit about vectors, since I did my WPE-II exam on them. If you are curious, feel free to look at the written portion as well as the slides I used for my talk.

Teaching

I was recently selected by the Center for Teaching and Learning as one of six recipients of their Graduate Fellowship for Teaching Excellence for 2008-09.

I just finished teaching CSE399: Special Topics- C++ this past semester (Spring of 2008), and also taught it last year.

I also have significant experience as a TA:

Spring 2006: I TA'ed for Amir Roth's CSE371
Fall 2005: I TA'ed for Milo Martin's CIS501
Most of my undergrad career at Tech: I TA'ed for CS 1322 (Second intro to programming class, in Java).

For fun

Don't tell my advisor I occasionally have free time! When I do, here are some things I like to do with it:

Fencing
Cooking
Dungeons & Dragons
My own programming for fun projects (including JDice the dice rolling program I wrote for our D&D games.
Running
Chess
Nethack and Slashem
Swimming

On top of that, I'm a fan of the following comics (Warning: some are addictive. You may spend multiple hours reading them).

The Order of The Stick (D&D related)
Two Lumps (about cats)
Schlock Mercenary (space mercenaries)
Dilbert (office related humor)

Contact Info

Department of CIS
Levine Hall
3330 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389

Email: a d h i l t o n @ s e a s . u p e n n. e d u