Moving at the Speed of Clicks: Improving Computer Efficiency

Computer scientist Mark Hill uncovers inefficiencies in computer workflows and helps make computers more powerful, energy efficient and easier to program. (Image credit: NSF.)

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The computer is one of the most complex machines ever devised and most of us only ever interact with its simplest surfaces. For each keystroke and web-click, thousands of instructions must be communicated in diverse machine languages and millions of calculations computed.

One of the main ways that Hill does this is by analyzing the performance of computer tasks. Like a coach with a stopwatch, Hill times how long it takes an ordinary processor to, say, analyze a query from Facebook or perform a web search. He's not only interested in the overall speed of the action, but how long each step in the process takes.

Through careful analysis, Hill uncovers inefficiencies, sometimes major ones, in the workflows by which computers operate and creates new solutions that make computers more powerful, more energy effective and easier to program.

Name: Mark Hill Institution: University of Wisconsin Field of Study: Computer Science

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