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Interests
Teaching grad students more about real-world CPU performance, low-overhead tracing, and understanding delays in layers of software and hardware. Better understanding of performance issues at the hardware-software interface. His most recent performance analysis work at Google has included speeding up searches, Gmail, disk server hardware/software, and network interfaces.
I am working on a book about understanding the performance of complex datacenter software.
Education
BS Mathematics, MIT 1969
Master's program(no degree) CS, University of North Carolina 1969-70
PhD Computer Science, Stanford University 1974 (Don Knuth, advisor)
Awards
Hertz Fellow, Stanford 1972-73
U.S. National Academy of Engineering 2008
66 United States patents, hardware and software
Employment
August 2019 - Visiting Professor at University of North Carolina for Fall semester
April 2019 - Visiting Professor at Stanford University for Spring quarter
March 2018 - October 2018 Consultant, Tesla Motors
July 2017 - December 2017 Visiting Professor, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
July 2016 - December 2016 Visiting Professor, National University of Singapore
2004 - May 2016 Google, User-facing latency analysis, tracing CPU/network/disk, language detection.
1997 - 2004 Adobe Systems, Acrobat first e-book, Photoshop image metadata
1980 - 1996 Digital Equipment, VAX microcode, Alpha architecture, binary translation, address tracing
1976 - 1980 University of California/San Diego, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Pre-1976 IBM, Burroughs, Hewlett-Packard, Los Alamos (student and summer jobs)
Favorite computers/architectures: IBM 1401, Stretch, 7094, S/360, Cray-1, DEC Alpha
First program: Summer 1959, Pascal's triangle on vacuum-tube ORACLE machine
Link to selected papers, talks (roughly newer to older) Recent:
Datacenter Computers: Modern Challenges in CPU Design (invited talk, UNC Distinguished Alumni Speaker Series 2015)
video: http://video.cs.unc.edu/talks/50thAlumniSpeakers/2015_02_23_Dick_Sites.mp4
slides: http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2015/slides/DatacenterComputers.pdf
Richard L. Sites email <nickname>.sites@gmail.com
Richard (Dick) Sites is a computer architect with a strong background in performance analysis at the hardware/software interface. He was co-architect of the DEC Alpha processors, and has also worked on compilers, VAX binary translation, and execution tracing. He has an interest in international text, including language detection for web pages. Fred Brooks, John Cocke, and Seymour Cray strongly influenced his approach to computer architecture; Don Knuth his approach to CPU performance; and Edward Tufte his approach to displaying dense tracing information. By a fluke of fate, his Erdős Number is 3.