Notre Dame's Pete Kogge Receives 2015 IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 11 February 2015 – Peter M. Kogge, who has served as the Ted H. McCourtney Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Notre Dame University since 1994, has been awarded IEEE Computer Society’s 2015 Computer Pioneer Award.

The award honors the vision of individuals whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. Kogge is the developer of the space shuttle I/O processor and the world’s first multicore processor. He is being recognized for “the pioneering of three areas of computer architecture development of parallel algorithms for recurrence embodied in the Kogge-Stone adder, the development of the multicore microprocessor chip, and the formalization of methods for designing the control of a computer pipeline.”

Kogge’s research has encompassed massively parallel processing architectures, advanced VLSI and nanotechnologies and their relationship to computing systems architectures, non-von Neumann models of programming and execution, and parallel algorithms and applications and their impact on computer architecture.

Kogge has been at the forefront of several innovations that have shaped the computing industry over the past several decades. While working on his Ph.D. at Stanford University in the 1970s, he invented the Kogge-Stone adder process, what is still considered the fastest way of adding numbers in a computer. During his 26-year career at IBM, Kogge, an IBM Fellow, designed the space shuttle I/O processor, one of the first multithreaded computers and the first to fly in space. Kogge was also inventor of the world’s first multicore processor, EXECUBE, which he and his IBM team placed on a memory chip in an early effort to solve the data bottleneck problem.

An IEEE Fellow, Kogge has also received the 2014 IPDPS Charles Babbage Award and the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Award. He is the co-inventor on more than three dozen patents and the author of two textbooks, including the first textbook on pipelining, a now ubiquitous technique for executing multiple instructions in a computer in parallel. He has led a team of computer professionals for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore development of a supercomputer capable of executing a quintillion mathematical operations per second. He is also chief scientist at Emu Solutions Inc., a company developing new architectures for big data.

The Computer Pioneer Award was established in 1981 by the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors to recognize and honor the vision of those whose efforts resulted in the creation and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least 15 years earlier. The recognition is engraved on a bronze medal.

Stanford University professor emeritus Michael Flynn, an early IBM designer and developer of “Flynn’s Taxonomy,” is also a 2015 IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award recipient.

Recent Pioneer Award recipients include Linux developer Linus Torvalds, ENIAC programmer Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, VLSI expert Lynn Conway, artificial intelligence innovator Edward Feigenbaum, parallel programming pioneer David Kuck, digital systems designer Edward McCluskey, MATLAB creator Cleve Moler, petri net theory developer Carl Petri, and programming languages pioneer Jean Sammet.

Learn more about the Pioneer Award.