Joel Emer Honored for Bridging Industry-Academic Divide
LOS ALAMITOS, 14 April, 2009 -- The IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will jointly present the Eckert-Mauchly Award to Dr. Joel Emer of Intel Corp. for pioneering contributions to performance analysis, modeling methodologies, and design innovations in several significant industry microprocessors. Emer developed quantitative methods including measurement of real machines, analytical modeling, and simulation techniques that are now widely employed to evaluate the performance of complex computer processors.
He was also cited for his ability to bridge the gaps that often mark research and development as well as academia and industry. He will receive the 2009 Eckert-Mauchly Award, known as the most prestigious award in the computer architecture community, at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, June 20-24, in Austin, Texas.
Emer contributed original analysis and novel architecture research for various VAX and Alpha processors developed by Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) and Compaq Computer Corp. These instruction set architectures were the preeminent super-minicomputer and microprocessor architectures of their time. Emer’s groundbreaking approach to performance modeling and evaluation techniques led to higher quality and more applicable research results, and his architectural contributions helped maintain the Alpha processors as the fastest microprocessors of their era.
As an industry researcher, Emer collaborated with university researchers on pioneering work on simultaneous multithreading, a technique for using a single instance of processor hardware to execute multiple programs simultaneously. These concepts have been used in several major industry processors including the Intel Pentium 4 processor and the Intel Core i7 processor.
Over his career, Emer has made other significant contributions in areas ranging from pipeline organization and vector processing to caches and prediction. Recently, he has contributed techniques for analyzing the architectural impact of soft errors that have been widely applied by architecture researchers to accurately access the benefits of their ideas for mitigating faults due to cosmic rays and Alpha radiation.
Emer is an Intel Fellow and Director of Microarchitecture Research at Intel Corp. Since 2005, he has also been a visiting faculty member at MIT. Before joining Intel in 2001, he was a Compaq Fellow and Director of Alpha Architecture Research, where he led research efforts for future processors for Compaq’s 64-bit family of servers. He spent 22 years at Digital/Compaq, where he worked on processor architecture, performance analysis, and performance modeling methodologies, and served on the task force that proposed DEC’s Alpha processor strategy.
In 2004, Emer was named an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow for contributions to computer architecture and quantitative processor performance analysis. He holds 25 patents and has published more than 35 papers. He received both a BS degree with highest honors in electrical engineering, and an MS degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois under the 2000 Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Edward Davidson.
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Eckert-Mauchly Award, which was initiated in 1979, and is given for contributions to computer and digital systems architecture. It 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, known as ENIAC—the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, completed in 1947. It comes with a $5,000 prize.
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