John L. Hennessy

Last updated
John Hennessy
John L Hennessy (cropped).jpg
Hennessy at Stanford, June 2007
10thPresident of Stanford University
In office
September 1, 2000 [1]  –August 31, 2016 [2]
Known for Reduced instruction set computer
MIPS Technologies
Atheros
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Computer architecture [5]
Thesis A real-time language for small processors: design, definition and implementation  (1977)
Doctoral advisor Richard Kieburtz
Doctoral students
Website hennessy.stanford.edu

John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist who is chairman of Alphabet Inc. (Google). [8] Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Technologies and Atheros, and also the tenth President of Stanford University. Hennessy announced that he would step down in the summer of 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. [9] Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley." [10]

Contents

Along with David Patterson, Hennessy was a recipient of the 2017 Turing Award for their work in developing the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, which is now used in 99% of new computer chips. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]

Early life and education

Hennessy was raised in Huntington, New York, as one of six children. [10] His father was an aerospace engineer, and his mother was a teacher before raising her children. [10] He is of Irish-Catholic descent, with some of his ancestors arriving in America during the potato famine in the 19th century. [18]

He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University, and his master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Stony Brook University. [6] [19] [20]

Career and research

Hennessy became a Stanford faculty member in 1977. In 1981, he began the MIPS project to investigate RISC processors, and in 1984, he used his sabbatical year to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. to commercialize the technology developed by his research. In 1987, he became the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. [20]

Hennessy was director of Stanford's Computer System Laboratory (1989–93), a research center run by Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. He was chair of the Department of Computer Science (1994–96) and Dean of the School of Engineering (1996–99). [20]

In 1999, Stanford President Gerhard Casper appointed Hennessy to succeed Condoleezza Rice as Provost of Stanford University. When Casper stepped down to focus on teaching in 2000, the Stanford Board of Trustees named Hennessy to succeed Casper as president. In 2008, Hennessy earned a salary of $1,091,589 ($702,771 base salary, $259,592 deferred benefits, $129,226 non-tax benefits), the 23rd highest among all American university presidents. [21]

Hennessy has been a board member of Google (later Alphabet Inc.), [22] Cisco Systems, [23] Atheros Communications, [24] and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. [25] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2008. [26]

On October 14, 2010, Hennessy was presented a khata by the 14th Dalai Lama before the latter addressed Maples Pavilion. [27]

In December 2010, Hennessy coauthored an editorial with Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust urging the passage of the DREAM Act; [28] the legislation did not pass the 111th United States Congress.

In 2013, Hennessy became a judge for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He has remained on the judging panel for the subsequent awards in 2015 and 2017.

In June 2015, Hennessy announced that he would step down as Stanford president in summer 2016. [29]

In 2016, Hennessy co-founded the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program; he serves as its inaugural director. The program has a $750 million endowment to fully fund graduate students at Stanford for up to three years. [30] [31] The inaugural class of 51 scholars from 21 countries arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2018. [32]

In February 2018, Hennessy was announced as the new Chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. [33]

Hennessy has a history of strong interest and involvement in college-level computer education. He co-authored, with David Patterson, two well-known books on computer architecture, Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, [5] which introduced the DLX RISC architecture. They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990. [34]

Hennessy also contributed to updating Donald Knuth's MIX processor to the MMIX. Both are model computers used in Knuth's classic series, The Art of Computer Programming . MMIX is Knuth's DLX equivalent.

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Personal life

Hennessy is married to Andrea Berti, whom he met in high school. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIPS Technologies</span> American fabless semiconductor design company

MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Lamport</span> American computer scientist and mathematician

Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Cocke (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist and mathematician

John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."

The DLX is a RISC processor architecture designed by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, the principal designers of the Stanford MIPS and the Berkeley RISC designs (respectively), the two benchmark examples of RISC design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Patterson (computer scientist)</span> American computer pioneer and academic (born 1947)

David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Liskov</span> American computer scientist

Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the introduction of abstract data types and the accompanying principle of data abstraction, along with the Liskov substitution principle, which applies these ideas to object-oriented programming, subtyping, and inheritance. Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science.

Jeffrey David Ullman is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers, theory of computation, data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields. He and his long-time collaborator Alfred Aho are the recipients of the 2020 Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science.

MIPS, an acronym for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages, was a research project conducted by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University between 1981 and 1984. MIPS investigated a type of instruction set architecture (ISA) now called reduced instruction set computer (RISC), its implementation as a microprocessor with very large scale integration (VLSI) semiconductor technology, and the effective exploitation of RISC architectures with optimizing compilers. MIPS, together with the IBM 801 and Berkeley RISC, were the three research projects that pioneered and popularized RISC technology in the mid-1980s. In recognition of the impact MIPS made on computing, Hennessey was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2000 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2001 by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in 2001 by the IEEE Computer Society, and, again with David Patterson, the Turing Award in 2017 by the ACM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Symposium on Computer Architecture</span>

The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) is an annual academic conference on computer architecture, generally viewed as the top-tier in the field. Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society are technical sponsors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Horowitz</span> American computer architect (born 1957)

Mark A. Horowitz is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments and previously served as the Chair of the Electrical Engineering department from 2008 to 2012. He is a co-founder, the former chairman, and the former chief scientist of Rambus Inc.. Horowitz has authored over 700 published conference and research papers and is among the most highly-cited computer architects of all time. He is a prolific inventor and holds 374 patents as of 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kunle Olukotun</span> British-born Nigerian computer scientist

Oyekunle Ayinde "Kunle" Olukotun is a British-born Nigerian computer scientist who is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Olukotun is known as the “father of the multi-core processor”, and the leader of the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor research project. Olukotun's achievements include designing the first general-purpose multi-core CPU, innovating single-chip multiprocessor and multi-threaded processor design, and pioneering multicore CPUs and GPUs, transactional memory technology and domain-specific languages programming models. Olukotun's research interests include computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems, domain specific languages and high-level compilers.

Susan J. Eggers is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computer architecture and compilers.

Stanford DASH was a cache coherent multiprocessor developed in the late 1980s by a group led by Anoop Gupta, John L. Hennessy, Mark Horowitz, and Monica S. Lam at Stanford University. It was based on adding a pair of directory boards designed at Stanford to up to 16 SGI IRIS 4D Power Series machines and then cabling the systems in a mesh topology using a Stanford-modified version of the Torus Routing Chip. The boards designed at Stanford implemented a directory-based cache coherence protocol allowing Stanford DASH to support distributed shared memory for up to 64 processors. Stanford DASH was also notable for both supporting and helping to formalize weak memory consistency models, including release consistency. Because Stanford DASH was the first operational machine to include scalable cache coherence, it influenced subsequent computer science research as well as the commercially available SGI Origin 2000. Stanford DASH is included in the 25th anniversary retrospective of selected papers from the International Symposium on Computer Architecture and several computer science books, has been simulated by the University of Edinburgh, and is used as a case study in contemporary computer science classes.

Daniel P. Siewiorek is an American computer engineer and computer scientist, currently the Buhl University Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ACM SIGARCH</span> ACMs Special Interest Group on computer architecture

ACM SIGARCH is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on computer architecture, a community of computer professionals and students from academia and industry involved in research and professional practice related to computer architecture and design. The organization sponsors many prestigious international conferences in this area, including the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), recognized as the top conference in this area since 1975. Together with IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA), it is one of the two main professional organizations for people working in computer architecture.

The Association for Computing Machinery SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award is given annually for outstanding contribution to computer architecture by a young computer scientist or engineer; "young" defined as having a career that started within the last 20 years. The award is named after Maurice Wilkes, a computer scientist credited with several important developments in computing such as microprogramming. The award is presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture. Prior recipients include:

Mark D. Hill is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been cited over 27,000 times.

Norman Paul Jouppi is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist.

Timothy M. Pinkston is an American computer engineer, researcher, educator and administrator whose work is focused in the area of computer architecture. He holds the George Pfleger Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Southern California (USC). He also serves in an administrative role as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Luiz André Barroso was a Brazilian computer engineer. While working for Google, he pioneered the design of the modern data center. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Barroso worked at Digital Equipment Corporation prior to joining Google.

References

  1. ↑ Robinson, James (April 5, 2000). "Provost John L. Hennessy named Stanford's 10th president". Stanford News. Retrieved December 1, 2023.
  2. ↑ Lapin, Lisa (June 21, 2016). "Stanford President-elect Marc Tessier-Lavigne is preparing to take office Sept. 1". Stanford News. Retrieved December 1, 2023.
  3. ↑ "John L. Hennessy, Stanford University". nasonline.org.
  4. ↑ "John Hennessy". acm.org.
  5. 1 2 3 Patterson, David; Hennessy, John H.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C. (2007). Computer architecture: a quantitative approach. San Diego: Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN   978-0-12-370490-0.
  6. 1 2 3 4 John L. Hennessy at the Mathematics Genealogy Project OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  7. ↑ Paulson, Lawrence Charles (1981). A Compiler Generator for Semantic Grammars (PhD thesis). Stanford University. OCLC   757240716. ProQuest   303229537.
  8. ↑ Haselton, Todd (2018-02-01). "John Hennessy named as Alphabet's new board chairman". CNBC. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  9. ↑ "Stanford University President John L. Hennessy to step down in 2016". Stanford News. 2015-06-11. Retrieved 2016-05-16.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Auletta, Ken (April 30, 2012). "Get Rich U." The New Yorker . Archived from the original on 25 March 2013. Retrieved 6 April 2013.
  11. ↑ "Computer Chip Visionaries Win Turing Award". The New York Times . 2018-03-21.
  12. ↑ John L. Hennessy, Stanford Website
  13. ↑ The Secret of Silicon Valley, John Hennessy speaks at Stanford
  14. ↑ Interview with John Hennessy
  15. ↑ Interview with John Hennessy, concerning the video game industry (audio and text) - 2009-06-22
  16. ↑ John L. Hennessey Papers
  17. ↑ John Hennessy's higher learning, strategy+business interview (2019)
  18. ↑ University, © Stanford; Stanford; California 94305. "John Hennessy : An Oral History". purl.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2023-10-20.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  19. ↑ Hennessy, John Leroy (1977). A real-time language for small processors: design, definition, and implementation (PhD thesis). State University of New York at Stony Brook. OCLC   31799595. ProQuest   302854127.
  20. 1 2 3 "Curriculum Vitae". Office of the President. Archived from the original on October 24, 2012. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
  21. ↑ "Million-Dollar College Presidents". The Daily Beast. November 14, 2010. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
  22. ↑ "Board of Directors". Google Investor Relations. Retrieved June 14, 2012.
  23. ↑ "Governing Board". Cisco Systems. Archived from the original on 2007-10-15. Retrieved 2006-10-25.
  24. ↑ "Governing Board". Atheros Communications. Archived from the original on 2006-11-05. Retrieved 2007-02-20.
  25. ↑ "Board of Trustees". Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
  26. ↑ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-04-28.
  27. ↑ "President Hennessy salutes the Dalai Lama, and is honored in return". Stanford University Report. October 14, 2010. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
  28. ↑ "Deserving of the DREAM". Politico. December 8, 2010. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
  29. ↑ "Stanford University President John L. Hennessy to step down in 2016". 2015-06-11.
  30. ↑ Frequently Asked Questions | Knight-Hennessy Scholars Archived 2016-08-26 at the Wayback Machine Stanford, Retrieved 15 August 2016
  31. ↑ Amini, Mariam (2018-03-03). "Alphabet's John Hennessy talks about helping international students with scholarships". CNBC. Retrieved 13 August 2018.
  32. ↑ Chang, Annie (16 Feb 2018). "Inaugural Knight-Hennessy Scholars selected". The Stanford Daily.
  33. ↑ "Alphabet Names New Executive Chairman to Replace Eric Schmidt". Fortune. Retrieved 2018-02-02.
  34. ↑ "John Hennessy and David Patterson win the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in ICT". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 2024-02-15.
  35. ↑ "Dr. John L. Hennessy". NAE Website. 2023-06-30. Retrieved 2024-02-15.
  36. ↑ "IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
  37. ↑ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  38. ↑ "Jeffrey P. Bezos Biography Photo". 2001. A discussion on the future of technology at the 2001 Summit. Bezos is joined by Bell Labs President Dr. Jeong Kim, Microsoft's Dr. Charles Simonyi, Stanford President Dr. John L. Hennessy, and tech entrepreneur Dr. Kenan Sahin.
  39. ↑ Przybylski, S.; Horowitz, M.; Hennessy, J. (1989). "Characteristics of performance-optimal multi-level cache hierarchies". ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News. 17 (3): 114–121. doi:10.1145/74926.74939.
  40. ↑ Kuskin, J.; Horowitz, M.; Gupta, A.; Rosenblum, M.; Hennessy, J.; Ofelt, D.; Heinrich, M.; Heinlein, J.; Simoni, R.; Gharachorloo, K.; Chapin, J.; Nakahira, D.; Baxter, J. (1994). "The Stanford FLASH multiprocessor". ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News. 22 (2): 302–313. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.467.9672 . doi:10.1145/192007.192056.
  41. ↑ "John Hennessy". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 2012-10-03. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
  42. ↑ "Stanford President Hennessy wins IEEE's highest honor". December 2011.
  43. ↑ "IEEE Medal of Honor Recipients" (PDF). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-04-22.
  44. ↑ "John L. Hennessy elected to Royal Academy of Engineering". 2017-09-07.
  45. ↑ "John Hennessy and David Patterson will receive the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award". acm.org. Retrieved 2018-03-21.
  46. ↑ BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards 2020
  47. ↑ "History of the Clark Kerr Award | Academic Senate". academic-senate.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
  48. ↑ "Recipients of the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering". nae.edu.
  49. ↑ "Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering". nae.edu.
Academic offices
Preceded by Provost of Stanford University
1999–2000		Succeeded by
Preceded by President of Stanford University
2000–2016		Succeeded by
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.