John L. Hennessy

My research interests are in computer architecture, specifically the design of high-performance computing systems. In the earlier part of my career I investigated instruction set architecture and contributed to the design of RISC architectures, as well as the underlying compilers to make effective use of such architectures. Since the late 1980s my research has focused on multiprocessor architectures and the accompanying software systems. Much of my attention has been addressed to the challenge of scaling shared-memory computing models to larger processor counts. I have also done work on comparisons of alternative architectural models and the programming approaches for these models. In high-performance computing systems the hardware and software are highly interdependent, and one cannot adequately evaluate architecture or a software system without a detailed understanding of the other. Thus, my interests have naturally included all aspects of the architecture (e.g., memory model, latency tolerance, synchronization support) as well as the programming systems for parallel computers, including programming models, programming languages, and compilers.