The 2021 Eckert-Mauchly Award has been awarded to Margaret Martonosi for contributions to the design, modeling, and verification of power-efficient computer architecture which have led to new fields of research.

Administered jointly by ACM and IEEE Computer Society, this  annual award of $5,000 recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture and combined hardware-software design. 

It is named after John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of one of the very first computers - ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) completed in 1947. You can discover their story in Eckert & Mauchly and ENIAC.

The citation for the 2021  Eckert-Mauchly Award reads:

“For contributions to the design, modeling, and verification of power-efficient computer architecture.”

and its recipient is Margaret Martonosi who is the Hugh Trumbull Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University where she has been on the faculty since 1994. She is currently on leave from Princeton while serving as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the U.S. National Science Foundation. During her career to date she has authored more than 175 publications (with 17,000 + citations) on subjects including parallel architectures, memory hierarchies, compilers, and mobile networks.

Martonosi is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and was made an ACM Fellow in 2009:

For contributions in power-aware computing.

an area in which she collaborated with David Brooks. In 2018 their 1999 paper  “Dynamically Exploiting Narrow Width Operands to Improve Processor Power and Performance” became the inaugural winner of the HPCA Test-of-Time Paper award, presented  by the IEEE Computer Society for the most influential papers published in prior sessions of the International Symposium of High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA).

The press release for the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award highlights three areas in which Martonosi's work has been groundbreaking:

• Power Simulation and Estimation

Martonosi responded to the need for microarchitecture- and architecture-level power modeling and measurement infrastructure with Wattch, co-developed with David Brooks and Vivek Tiwari, an architectural simulator that estimates CPU power consumption, which is used by thousands of researchers today. She also developed live runtime measurement tools for detailed power assessments of widely used and complex microprocessor systems.

• ZebraNet Full-Stack Computing Platform

Broadening her scope beyond conventional computers, Martonosi established the new research field of Mobile Sensor Networks and with ZebraNet developed energy-efficient protocols for short-range, pairwise data transfers. Martonosi’s work demonstrated that sparsely deployed mobile sensors could offer high data delivery rates and sensor coverage over large areas, at practical power budgets. In Kenya ZebraNet provided biologists with never-before-seen animal behavior data. 

• Memory Consistency Model Specification and Verification

Martonosi’s work, embodied in the Check suite of verification tools, has demonstrated the potential of fast, early-stage formal methods to verify the correctness of memory consistency model implementation making immediate and significant impact. 

According to the ACM:

Modern hardware complexity also presents security challenges, and the Check suite includes efforts to provide rigorous and automated approaches for determining if a microarchitecture is susceptible to specified classes of security exploits. This kind of automatic checking will be fundamental to future information security.

Martonosi will be formally recognized with the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award during ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), which is being held virtually this year from June 14th-19th.

More Information

Margaret Martonosi Receives 2021 Eckert-Mauchly Award

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