Todd Austin Receives A. Richard Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award for 2012

Professor Todd Austin has received the A. Richard Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award for his work on runtime microprocessor verification. This award is given by the MARCO/DARPA Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) to recognize GSRC projects and/or concepts that were initiated at least five years ago and that have had substantial industrial impact. The award honors the innovative career of the late A. Richard Newton, former Dean of Engineering at UC Berkeley and founding director of the GSRC center, and is assigned once a year at the GSRC Annual Symposium. This is the second time that Prof. Austin has been selected for this honor.

Prof. Austin is interested in the design and implementation of high-performance, power-efficient, and cost-effective computing systems. His research interests include computer architecture, reliable system design, hardware and software verification, and performance analysis tools and techniques. Projects he has worked on recently include “Bulletproof,” a set of novel ultra low-cost mechanisms to protect a microprocessor pipeline and on-chip memory system from silicon defects, and “Razor,” a low-power processor design based on timing speculation that increases energy efficiency with little performance impact.

Prof. Austin received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1996. In 2002, he was a Sloan Research Fellow, and in 2007 he received the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for “for innovative contributions in Computer Architecture including the SimpleScalar Toolkit and the DIVA and Razor architectures.” In addition to his work in academia, Prof. Austin is a co-founder of SimpleScalar LLC and InTempo Design LLC. He is the first to take credit (but the last to accept blame) for creating the SimpleScalar Tool Set, a popular collection of computer architecture performance analysis tools. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, Prof. Austin was a Senior Computer Architect in Intel’s Microcomputer Research Labs, a product-oriented research laboratory in Hillsboro, Oregon.