ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award

The award of $2,500 is given annually for an outstanding contribution to computer architecture made by an individual whose computer-related professional career (graduate school or full-time employment, whichever began first) started no earlier than January 1st of the year that is 20 years prior to the year of the award.

2024 Maurice Wilkes Award Call for Nomination

The award is presented annually at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Awards Banquet. This year’s recipient will be invited to accept the award at ISCA 2024.

Nominations should consist of:

  1. Name, address, and phone number of person making the nomination.
  2. Name, affiliation, address, email, and telephone number of candidate for whom the award is recommended.
  3. A statement (between 200 and 500 words long) as to why the candidate deserves the award. Note that since the award is for an outstanding contribution, the statement and supporting letters should address what the contribution is and why it is both outstanding and significant.
  4. A proposed award citation in case the candidate is selected. (The SIGARCH EC decides on the actual citation.)
  5. A maximum of five letters of support. Include the name, affiliation, email address, and telephone number of the letter writer(s). Supporters of multiple candidates are strongly encouraged to compare the candidates in their letters.
  6. A statement regarding the nominee’s specific year of eligibility. That is, when did they begin their computer-related professional career, and are there any circumstances for which the 20 years of eligibility should be adjusted?
  7. State any conflicts of interest (COI) between the nominee and any committee members. Refer to the ACM COI guidelines (item 7) to determine what constitutes a COI. Please state explicitly if there are no conflicts.
  8. Nominees for the Maurice Wilkes Award are expected to have adhered to the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Nominator and endorsers for the award must disclose whether they are aware of any violation of this Code by the nominee. The Code’s general ethical principles are as follows:
    • Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing
    • Avoid harm
    • Be honest and trustworthy
    • Be fair and take action not to discriminate
    • Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts
    • Respect privacy
    • Honor confidentiality

Please send all your nomination materials as one pdf file no later than March 1, 2024 to the Chair of the Nominating Committee (Norm Jouppi jouppi@google.com).

The recipient of the Maurice Wilkes Award is selected by a vote of the SIGARCH Executive Committee and Board from a list of nominees submitted by the SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Awards Committee.

The Awards Committee consists of three members. Each member of the committee is selected by the Chair of SIGARCH to serve a three year term, with one new member added to the committee each year. Each committee member will serve as the Chair of the Awards Committee during their second year on the committee. Each year at least one member of the Awards Committee should be a member of the SIGARCH Executive Committee or Board, and at least one member should not be a member of the SIGARCH Executive Committee or Board. The Awards Committee should nominate from one to three candidates for selection by the SIGARCH Executive Committee and Board. The Awards Committee should transmit supporting materials for its nominees, along with a ranking of the nominees if appropriate, to the SIGARCH Chair. When a winner is selected, the SIGARCH Chair and the Awards Committee Chair will choose a citation for the Award.

The committee follows the ACM conflict of interest guidelines. The SIGARCH chair may need to adjust the committee to be consistent with these guidelines.

Each year the SIGARCH Chair should appoint the new member of the Awards Committee by December 15th, and should prepare by that date a Call for Nominations, which includes the award citation and the Award Committee’s contact information. The Call should be mailed to appropriate mailing lists.

The nomination deadline should be set for at least 8 weeks before the start of the award year’s ISCA conference. The Awards Committee should take no more than three weeks after the deadline to select their nominees. The SIGARCH Executive Committee and Board should take no more than a week from the delivery of nominations from the Awards Committee to make their selection. After a citation is determined, no less than four weeks from the start of the ISCA conference, the SIGARCH Chair will inform the winner, and inform ACM Headquarters of the decision so that a plaque can be ordered and a check drawn in time for delivery to the ISCA conference.

  • Norm Jouppi, Google (Chair)
  • José Martínez, Cornell University
  • Christos Kozyrakis, Stanford University

2024: Reetuparna Das
For contributions to in-memory computing

2023 – Abhishek Bhattacharjee
For contributions to memory address translation used in widely available commercial microprocessors and operating systems.

2022 – Moinuddin Qureshi
For contributions to high performance memory system.

2021 – Thomas Wenisch
For contributions to memory persistency and energy-efficient systems.

2020 – Luis Ceze and Karin Strauss
For contributions to storage and retrieval of digital data in DNA.

2019 – Onur Mutlu
For innovative contributions to efficient and secure DRAM systems.

2018 – Gabriel H. Loh
For outstanding contributions to the advancement of die-stacked architectures.

2017 – Lieven Eeckhout
For outstanding contributions to computer architecture performance analysis and modeling.

2016 – Timothy Sherwood
For contributions to novel program analysis advancing architectural modeling and security.

2015 – Christos Kozyrakis
For outstanding contributions to transactional memory systems.

2014 – Ravi Rajwar
For contributions to the design and commercialization of hardware transactional memory.

2013 – Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan
For contributions to the design of power-efficient microblade servers and pioneering work in disaggregated system designs.

2012 – David Brooks
For outstanding contributions to power modeling, circuit and microarchitectural techniques to improve energy efficiency.

2011 – Kevin Skadron
For outstanding contributions to thermal-aware computer architecture modeling and design.

2010 – Andreas Moshovos
For foundational contributions to the area of memory dependence prediction.

2009 – Shubu Mukherjee
For outstanding contributions to modeling and design of soft-error tolerant microarchitectures.

2008 – Sarita Adve
For formalization of memory consistency models, especially data-race free models, and their influence on both hardware and high-level languages.

2007 – Todd Austin
For innovative contributions in Computer Architecture including the SimpleScalar Toolkit and the DIVA and Razor architectures.

2006 – Doug Burger
For contributions to spatially distributed processor and memory systems architecture.

2005 – Steve Scott
For seminal contributions to the architecture and design of high-performance computer systems and interconnection networks.

2004 – Kourosh Gharachorloo
For outstanding contributions in the area of memory consistency models in shared-memory multiprocessors.

2003 – Dirk Meyer
For significant architectural contributions to Alpha and X86 processor designs.

2002 – Glenn Hinton
For the Pentium 4 microprocessor design and other contributions to the field of microarchitecture.

2001 – Anant Agarwal
For the first complete exploration of multithreading as a latency-tolerating technique for nondeterministic memory systems and software-assisted cache coherence.

2000 – William J. Dally
For contributions in the design of multiprocessor interconnection networks and parallel computer architectures.

1999 – Gurindar S. Sohi
For seminal contributions in the areas of high issue rate processors and instruction level parallelism.

1998 – Wen-mei Hwu
For the development of the Impact compiler and its use in evaluating new architectural features.

* At the discretion of the SIGARCH Executive Committee, eligibility may be adjusted for documented career interruptions (e.g., family-related or medical leaves, military service, pandemic-related impact on productivity). Questions about eligibility should be directed to the SIGARCH Chair (chair_sigarch@acm.org).

** At the discretion of the selection committee, the committee can choose to award a group of nominees if it becomes clear from their individual nominations that they all contributed equally to that single contribution, and thus are equally worthy.