Dr. Stephen W. Keckler at The University of Texas at Austin will receive the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) at a June 5 banquet in New York. The Hopper award is presented to the outstanding computer professional of the year for work performed before the age of 35.
Keckler, an assistant professor of computer sciences and of electrical and computer engineering, will be honored with the award and $5,000 for his groundbreaking analysis of technology scaling for high-performance computer processors. This work showed how conventional microprocessor designs will be unable to maintain their anticipated performance growth rate because of new challenges presented by silicon manufacturing processes.
His work identified distribution and partitioning of the key computation and storage components of a microprocessor as the critical issue to be addressed in future designs. It also shed light on the methods required to maintain performance improvement trends in computer architecture, and on the design implications for future high-performance processors and systems.
His seminal research articles include one that predicts that design limits of conventional microprocessors will eventually make them obsolete. The paper is among the most cited in recent years, and identifies wire delays as the key concern to be addressed in future designs. A second paper describes a method for exploiting instruction-level, data-level and thread-level parallelism in a single processor so that applications that exhibit different types of parallelism can all be run on the same hardware.
Keckler, 35, co-leads a research group to develop a new architecture called TRIPS (Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently adaptive Processing System), which promises scalability without significantly reducing the number of applications that users can run on their personal computers.
He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and master's and doctor's degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously was honored with a National Science Foundation career development award, a research fellowship from the Sloan Foundation, multiple IBM Faculty Partnership awards and a College of Natural Sciences Teaching Excellence Award.
The ACM is a premier organization for computing professionals, providing resources for professional development and for advancing the computing and information technology disciplines. The ACM also promotes policy and research that benefit society.
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