Yale N. Patt, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering, has been recognized for his tremendous body of work in microarchitecture with four papers co-authored by he and his students selected as part of the ten award winners of the inaugural Micro Test of Time Award in 2014. The Micro Test of Time (ToT) Award recognizes the most influential papers published in past Micro conferences that have had significant impact in the field.
The award is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Microprogramming & Microarchitecture (TCuARCH). TCuARCH "addresses all aspects of microarchitecture including but not limited to high performance and low power processors (superscalar, VLIW, multithreading, multi-core, vector, etc.), memory hierarchies, compiler optimization, and instruction-level parallelism. The TC sponsors workshops, tutorials, and conferences, including the flagship International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)."
This first award recognizes the 10 most influential papers published during the first 25 years of the conference, between 1968 and 1992. They were selected from among all 544 papers published in Micro during that period. In the future, one paper will be selected each year from papers published between 18 and 22 years ago
The 10 papers selected for this first year of the award are:
| Micro Year | Paper Title | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| Micro 1978 | Microprogrammed Implementation of A Single Chip Microprocessor | Skip Stritter, Nick Tredennick |
| Micro 1981 | Some Scheduling Techniques and An Easily Schedulable Horizontal Architecture for High Performance Scientific Computing | B. Ramakrishna Rau, C. D. Glaeser |
| Micro 1982 | MIPS: A Microprocessor Architecture | John Hennessy, Norman Jouppi, Steven Przybylski, Christopher Rowen, Thomas Gross, Forest Baskett, John Gill |
| Micro 1985 | Critical Issues Regarding HPS, A High Performance Microarchitecture | Yale N. Patt, Stephen W. Melvin, Wen-Mei Hwu, Michael C. Shebanow |
| Micro 1985 | HPS, A New Microarchitecture: Rationale and Introduction | Yale N. Patt, Wen-Mei Hwu, Michael Shebanow |
| Micro 1988 | Hardware Support for Large Atomic Units in Dynamically Scheduled Machines | Stephen W. Melvin, Michael C. Shebanow, Yale N. Patt |
| Micro 1991 | Two-Level Adaptive Training Branch Prediction | Tse-Yu Yeh, Yale N. Patt |
| Micro 1992 | Effective Compiler Support For Predicated Execution Using the Hyperblock | Scott A. Mahlke, David C. Lin, William Y. Chen, Richard E. Hank, Roger A. Bringmann |
| Micro 1992 | Code Generation Schema for Modulo Scheduled Loops | B. Ramakrishna Rau, Michael S. Schlansker, P. P. Tirumalai |
| Micro 1992 | Executing Compressed Programs on An Embedded RISC Architecture | Andrew Wolfe, Alex Chanin |
Prof. Yale Patt holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He also holds the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor. He has received a number of awards for his research and teaching, most notably the highest honor in his specialty, computer architecture, the 1996 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, "for important contributions to instruction level parallelism and superscalar processor design," and the highest honor in computer science education, the 2000 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.
Among the other awards he has received are the 1995 IEEE Emannuel R. Piore Medal, the 1999 IEEE W.W. McDowell Award, the 2005 IEEE Charles Babbage Award, the 2011 IEEE B. Ramakrishna Rau Award, and the 2013 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award.
Prof. Patt was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, among the highest professional distinctions bestowed upon an engineer.
