SCIENCE

Yale N. Patt, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been selected as the recipient of the inaugural IEEE Computer Society B. Ramakrishna Rau Award.

For more than four decades Patt has combined an active research program with consulting and teaching. IEEE recognized him "for significant contributions and inspiring leadership in the microarchitecture community with respect to teaching, mentoring, research and service."

The award, which comes with a $2,000 honorarium and certificate, will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), set for Dec. 3-7 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The IEEE Computer Society established the award in 2010 in memory of the late Bob Rau, a senior research scientist at HP Labs. The Rau Award recognizes significant accomplishments in the field of microarchitecture and compiler code generation.

"For Yale to receive the first Rau Award is an honor not only for Yale, but also for our Electrical and Computer Engineering Department here at The University of Texas at Austin," said Ahmed Tewfik, chair of the department. "Yale is one the top college educators in our nation in general, and computer engineering educators more specifically. He regularly teaches other university professors across the world how to present computer architecture to undergraduate and graduate students.

"Many of his innovations are embedded in the microprocessors that we all use in our laptops, tablets and smartphones. This award recognizes his many contributions over the years to research and education in computer engineering. "

In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. In 1984, he and students Wen-mei Hwu, Steve Melvin and Mike Shebanow introduced HPS, a high-performance microarchitecture that exploits instruction-level parallelism. Five years after that, Patt and student Tse-Yu Yeh introduced the Two-Level Branch Predictor, which provides much improved accuracy.

Patt's current research focuses on the potential challenges of 2018-era microprocessors, which are slated to contain more than 30 billion transistors. This includes breaking the abstraction layers that separate the problem statement in natural languages (like English) from the electronic circuits that actually execute the program. Among his projects is ACMP, a reconfigurable heterogeneous multicore microprocessor.

He is also working on improving the interface between the processor core and the DRAMs, on creating GPUs for non-graphics processing, establishing effective prefetching in a multi-core environment, and making more effective use of the run-time system for performance.

Patt holds the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He has received many international awards for his research and teaching, including the most prestigious award in computer architecture, the 1996 IEEE Computer Society/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award "for important contributions to instruction-level parallelism and superscalar processor design." Among his teaching commendations are the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for 2000, and the 2002 Texas Excellence Teaching Award for The University of Texas at Austin College of Engineering. Patt is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM.

Rau was among the computer architecture professionals who Patt respected most.

"Bob was one of the giants in our community who left us long before his time," Patt said. "Frankly, I did not expect I would be the first to get this award since I can think of at least two other people who are very deserving of it, including one who is my student. I can only say it is humbling to receive this award that bears his name."