Prof. John Hennessy, erstwhile Director of the Computer System Laboratory, now President of Stanford University, visited the University of Edinburgh to receive a Honorary Degree and give a public lecture on the Future of Microprocessor Architecture.
The lecture was very well structured and thrilling, especially the part about Thread Level Parallelism and a preview of SUNs upcoming Niagara Architecture. After having spent quite some time with a famous book written by Prof. Hennesy, namely Computer Architecture: A quantitative approach, I was really anxious to see this talk.
Prof. Hennessy led the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) team at Stanford in the early 1980s and was a cofounder, in 1984, of MIPS Computer Systems, now MIPS Technologies. He is a recipient of the 2000 John Von Neumann Medal, the 2000 ASEE R. Lamme Medal, the 2001 Eckert Mauchly Award and the 2001 Seymour Cray Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
So all in all this guy has done quite some stuff for computer science!
