SCIENCE
PROCESSOR ARCHITECT WINS ECKERT-MAUCHLY AWARD
University of
Wisconsin-Madison computer sciences professor Gurindar "Guri" Sohi
will be honored for techniques that contributed to the design of
high-performance microprocessors.
The Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery named Sohi
the recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly Award this month, citing his innovations in
processor architecture and instruction-level parallel processing.
Sohi will receive the 2011 Eckert-Mauchly Award, known as the computer
architecture community's most prestigious award, at the International Symposium
on Computer Architecture on June 7 in San Jose,
Calif.
A member of the UW-Madison computer sciences faculty since 1985, Sohi - now John P.
Morgridge and E. David Cronon
Professor of Computer Sciences - proposed new models for the design of
microprocessors that can process multiple instructions of a computer program in
parallel. His innovations are found today in almost every microprocessor used
from personal computers to powerful servers, and will soon be at work in smart
phones and tablet computers.
Sohi's influence on leading-edge microprocessors includes the multiscalar
paradigm - which guides the execution of a single, sequential program on
multiple processing cores - and his research group's proposal of memory
dependence prediction, which further improved microprocessor performance.
A fellow of the IEEE and ACM and member of the National Academy of Engineering,
Sohi served as chair of UW-Madison's Computer Sciences Department from 2004 to
2008. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering at Birla Institute of
Technology and Science in Pilani, India, and master's and doctorate degrees in
electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois.
The Eckert-Mauchly Award, initiated in 1979, recognizes contributions to
computer and digital systems architecture and includes a $5,000 prize. The
award was named for John
Presper Eckert and John
William Mauchly, who collaborated on
the design and construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
( ENIAC ), the first large-scale electronic computing machine. Previous winners
of the award include Wisconsin native Seymour
Cray.