Emer, Joel S.

2011 Distinguished Alumni Award

For advancing the art of performance modeling and measurement of microarchitectures and for contributions to the design of leading-edge microprocessors.

Joel S. Emer is currently an Intel Fellow and Director of Microarchitecture Research at Intel in Hudson, Massachusetts. He is also a professor of the practice in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After completing his Ph.D., he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation and then Compaq Computer. At Digital he was a member of the small corporate task force that proposed Digital’s Alpha processor strategy. Joel has been cited for innovative design contributions to a variety of Alpha processors. Earlier he was noted for nearly single handedly creating Digital’s corporate performance modeling methodology. His research record includes pioneering efforts in simultaneous multithreading, a technology now widely used in microprocessors such as the Intel Core i7. He also developed ground-breaking techniques for the analysis of the architectural impact of soft errors and made seminal contributions to the quantitative approach to processor evaluation. His techniques have established industry-wide practices and were the basis for the major textbook in the field.

Joel holds over 25 patents and has published more than 35 papers. He authored a chapter on performance modeling techniques for an upcoming textbook.

He is a highly sought after speaker, and has given over 10 distinguished invited lectures and keynote addresses. He has also served on the advisory board for several computer science departments.

He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi, and a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. In 2009, he was the recipient of the prestigious Eckert-Mauchly award, which is the highest professional recognition for contributions in computer architecture.