Kim receives historic achievement

7/2/2019 Allie Arp, CSL

ECE ILLINOIS Professor Nam Sung Kim achieved a historic milestone by becoming the 24th researcher in the world to be inducted into the Hall of Fame for all three of the major computer architecture conferences.

Written by Allie Arp, CSL

Recently, ECE ILLINOIS Professor Nam Sung Kim became just the 24th researcher in the world to be inducted into the Hall of Fame of all three of the major computer architecture conferences.

Inducted into the International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Hall of Fame in 2016, he completed the conference trifecta when he was inducted into the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) Hall of Fame in late June. All of these inductions required Kim to author or co-author at least eight papers that were accepted at each of these conferences, a challenging feat.

Nam Sung Kim
Nam Sung Kim
“These are the top three computer architecture conferences,” said Kim, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “The competition is extremely tough and sometimes it takes years to publish a paper to one of these conferences. But once accepted, because of their rigorous review processes, it typically impacts the research community profoundly and gets highly cited as a result.”

One of his ISCA papers has been cited more than 1000 times and the concept proposed in the paper has been adopted by practically all the modern microprocessors; the paper won the 2017 Most Influential ISCA Paper Award, which was given to the most impactful paper published in 2002.

As just the 24th researcher to achieve this accomplishment in a 50-year history of computer architecture conferences, Kim plans to continue to propose simple and practical solutions that benefit the industry.

“It is a significant milestone, especially when many academic reviewers of conferences, who are often confused between complexity and novelty (or creativity), tend to believe that simple (and practical) solutions don’t deserve to be published,” said Kim. “But I believe simple and practical solutions are creative and novel ones because only such solutions can [cost-effectively] solve the complex real-world problems and in fact they are much harder to come up with.”

Kim is the only faculty member from CSL or ECE that belongs to all three of the prestigious Hall of Fames. He joins other ECE ILLINOIS faculty in the ISCA, including Sarita Adve, Wen-mei Hwu, Janak Patel, and Sanjay Patel: in HPCA, Rakesh Kumar; and in the MICRO Hall of Fame, Wen-Mei Hwu and Sanjay Patel.

“The University of Illinois and CSL have distinguished track records in the computing field,” said Kim. “I am very honored, proud, and thrilled to be part of such great legacy.”

Kim went on to say that his Ph.D. advisor, Trevor Mudge, former CLS student and professor at the University of Michigan since the 1970s, once said, “If you go to one of these top computer architecture conferences, probably more than a third of them have an academic lineage with (past and current) faculty members of CSL.”

Kim is also affiliated with the CSL.

 

Check out the original article on the CSL site


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This story was published July 2, 2019.