The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society announced Kunle Olukotun, a Professor at Stanford University and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshop organizer, as the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions and leadership in the development of parallel systems.

The Eckert-Mauchly Award is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. It is co-sponsored by ACM and the IEEE Computer Society and comes with a $5,000 prize.

In the early 1990s, Olukotun became a leading designer of a new kind of microprocessor known as a “chip multiprocessor”—today called a “multicore processor.” His work demonstrated the performance advantages of multicore processors over the existing microprocessor designs at the time. He included these ideas in a landmark paper presented at the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 1996), entitled “The Case for a Single-Chip Multiprocessor.” This paper received the ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award 15 years later. Olukotun’s multicore design eventually became the industry standard.

Olukotun is the Cadence Design Systems Professor and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. At Stanford, he is the Director of the Pervasive Parallel Lab and a member of the Data Analytics for What’s Next (DAWN) Lab, developing infrastructure for usable machine learning. Olukotun has authored more than 200 publications which have received over 20,000 citations, and he has been issued 12 patents and has co-founded several companies.

Olukotun also co-organzied a Computing Community Consortium workshop, Digital Computing Beyond Moore’s Law in 2018. The workshop brought participants together to identify computer science challenges and possible approaches to the problem of building correct, maintainable and efficient software for future digital architectures using a set of case studies to explore these ideas.

He will be formally recognized with the Eckert-Mauchly Award during an awards luncheon on Tuesday, June 20 at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2023).

Read the ACM news release here.