Hwu Recipient of 2014 Rau Award

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 28 October 2014 – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Wen-mei W. Hwu has been named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society B. Ramakrishna Rau Award for his work in Instruction-Level Parallelism.

The Rau Award recognizes significant accomplishments in the field of microarchitecture and compiler code generation. Hwu was recognized "for contributions to Instruction Level Parallelism technology, including compiler optimization, program representation, microarchitecture, and applications."

The award, which comes with a $2,000 honorarium and a certificate, will be given out on Tuesday, 16 December at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) in Cambridge, UK. IEEE Computer Society established the award in 2010 in memory of the late Bob Rau, an HP Senior Fellow.

Hwu holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois. He is chief scientist of the Parallel Computing Institute and director of the IMPACT research group (http://impact.crhc.illinois.edu). He is a co-founder and CTO of MulticoreWare.

Hwu's research interests are in the area of architecture, implementation, compilation, and algorithms for parallel computing. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. He directs the Illinois' CUDA Center of Excellence and serves as one of the principal investigators of the US National Science Foundation's Blue Waters Petascale computer project.

He is the recipient of the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award, ISCA Influential Paper Award, and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Rau, who passed away in 2002, managed HP Labs' Compiler and Architecture Research group. A co-founder of Cydrome Inc. which developed one of the first VLIW mini-supercomputers, Rau authored dozens of articles on VLIW computing, co-authored a book on ILP, and held 15 patents. He was also a recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly Award and a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM.