Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher

Joseph A. Fisher is a Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow (Emeritus) at HP Labs, where he worked since 1990 in instruction-level parallelism and in custom embedded VLIW processors and their compilers. Josh studied at the Courant Institute of NYU (B.A., M.A., and then Ph.D. in 1979), where he devised the Trace Scheduling compiler algorithm and coined the term Instruction-level Parallelism. At HP, Fisher started and managed the HP Labs Cambridge (Mass) research laboratory.  As a professor at Yale University, he created and named VLIW Architectures and invented many of the fundamental technologies of ILP.

In 1984, he started Multiflow Computer with two members of his Yale team. Josh won an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, was the 1987 Connecticut Eli Whitney Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 2003 received the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award.  Josh retired from HP in 2006.