Davidson, Edward

2003 Distinguished Alumni Award

In recognition for his leadership in the electric power industry, his community involvement, and service to the University of Illinois.

A professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Davidson was honored for his contributions to the design of high-performance computers and the establishment of computer engineering as an academic discipline. His research interests included computer architecture, parallel and pipeline processing, performance modeling, intelligent caches, supercomputing, and application code assessment and tuning. With his graduate students, he developed the reservation table approach to optimum design and cyclic scheduling of pipelines, designed and implemented an eight-microprocessor SMP system in 1976, and developed a variety of systematic methods for computer performance evaluation and enhancement.