Professor Wen-mei Hwu has been honored with the 2022 SIGMICRO Distinguished Service Award.
He was presented with this distinction “for his leadership role in SIGMICRO service activities, particularly with respect to MICRO and CGO, that have had major impact on the role of SIGMICRO in the computer architecture community,” according to the SIGMICRO website.
Hwu’s research interests include architecture, microarchitecture, libraries and programming tools for parallel cognitive computing systems.
His dedication and drive led to him being nominated for this award, according to some of his colleagues. They said his “leadership in pivotal roles” had major impact on creating what SIGMICRO is today. While serving as the General Chair and Program Chair of MICRO in 1992, he turned an under-attended workshop into a symposium that brought in more than 100 researchers and now boasts several hundred attendees. Hwu was credited with being the driving force behind necessary changes to make the event what it is today.
Another example of Hwu’s leadership was establishing the Code Generation and Optimization conference. This is a spinoff of the compiler activity of MICRO. In 2003, Hwu realized a stand-alone conference was necessary because of growth. He served as its first Program Chair and nurtured it into a vital and effective conference.
Hwu said he was honored to be nominated for the award by Yale Patt and the other endorsers. “The success of MICRO and CGO has been the result of many people who passionately contributed to these conferences over the years,” he said. “I am proud to be among them and am humbled by this award.”