Duncan A. Buell

Professor

Department Chair

Professor Buell's research interests are the algorithms and architectures for performing computations, such as those in discrete mathematics and text/string processing, for which traditional computer architectures oriented toward floating-point computations normally perform at a significantly reduced efficiency. One class of such problems are those computational problems in number theory for which fast integer arithmetic, often multiprecision arithmetic, is necessary. Another broad class of problems are those for which "custom computing machines" were devised. These include bit-oriented computations such as those done in string processing, and image processing computations, for which one often needs substantial parallelism, but for which 8-bit or 12-bit arithmetic is often sufficient accuracy. At IDA/CCS he directed the Splash 2 project building a custom computing machine that used Xilinx FPGAs as the compute elements and whose applications were programmed in VHDL. Commercialized versions of and variations on Splash 2 are available from several vendors, and supercomputer scale machines using reconfigurable logic can be purchased and programmed from high level languages.

Education

• Ph. D., University of Illinois - Chicago(1976)
• M. A., University of Michigan (1972)
• B. S., University of Arizona (1971)

Selected Publications

• Y. Kopylova, D. A. Buell, C.-T. Huang, and J. Janies, "Mutual information applied to anomaly detection," Journal of Communications and Networks, to appear.
• S. Shida, Y. Shibata, K. Oguri, and D. A. Buell, "Implementation of a barotropic operator for ocean model simulation using a reconfgurable machine," Proceedings, FPL, August 2007.
• D. A. Buell, "Number theory," The Handbook of Information Security, Volume 2, John Wiley, 2006, pp. 532-547.
• D. A. Buell, "The Advanced Encryption Standard," The Handbook of Information Security, Volume 2, John Wiley, 2006, pp. 498-509.
• X. Feng, D. A. Buell, J. R. Rose, and P. J. Waddell, "Parallel algorithms for Bayesian phylogenetic inference," Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, v. 63, 2003, pp. 707-718.
• D. A. Buell, J. M. Arnold, and W. J. Kleinfelder, eds., Splash 2: FPGAs in a Custom Computing Machine, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
• D. A. Buell, Binary Quadratic Forms: Classical Theory and Modern Computations, Springer-Verlag, 1989.