Mateo Valero, Professor of the Technical University of Catalonia and Director of Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC), has been selected as the recipient of the 2007 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism. He will be formally presented with the award at the 34th International Symposium on Computer Architecture 2007 (ISCA 2007) to held in San Diego. Prof. Valero is the first Spaniard and the second European after Prof. Maurice V. Wilkes from the University of Cambridge to receive this honor, known as the most prestigious award in the computer architecture community. Every year the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society jointly present the Eckert-Mauchly Award for outstanding contributions to computer and digital systems architecture. This award was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of the first large scale electronic computing machine, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC, in 1947. Calling the award the highest honor which can be bestowed in the field of computer architecture, Prof. Mateo Valero says that “receiving this award is to recognize the effort of a lot of people who collaborated with me and, especially, my PhD students.” Other computer architects that received this award are Joseph A. Fisher (2003), pioneer of the VLIW processors; John Hennessy (2001), President of the University of Stanford and architect for the MIPS microprocessor; Tadashi Watanabe (1998), Program director of the Earth Simulator Supercomputer; Yale N. Patt (1996), Professor of the University of Texas and pioneer of the design of the superscalar processors such as Pentium, Burton J. Smith (1991), pioneer in the development of multiprocessors systems and multithreaded processors; Seymour Cray (1989), pioneer in the development of vector supercomputers; Gordon C. Bell (1982) chief architect of multiple machines of the series PDP from Digital, among others. Mateo Valero obtained his PhD in Telecommunication at UPC in 1980. He has been a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC since 1974. His research is focused on high performance architectures. He has published approximately 400 papers on these topics. Dr. Valero has been honored with several awards, including the King Jaime I by the Generalitat Valenciana, and two Spanish National awards, "Julio Rey Pastor" award for his research on IT technologies and “Leonardo Torres Quevedo” Award that recognizes the engineering research. In 1998, he won the “Favorite Son” Award of his home town, Alfamén (Zaragoza). In 2001, he was appointed Fellow of the IEEE and in 2002 Intel Distinguished Research Fellow. He has been Fellow of the ACM since 2003. He has been a foundational member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering since 1994. In 2005, he was elected Correspondent Academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and in 2006 he was also elected Academic of the Royal Academy of Science and Arts of Barcelona. In the same year he was awarded by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation as a researcher who have made a significant contribution to the development of science and technology in Catalonia. Moreover, his native town of Alfamén named their primary school after him. He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - the National Center of Supercomputing in Spain, that manages MareNostrum, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe.