SEAS’s David M. Brooks wins ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award

David M. Brooks, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) Maurice Wilkes Award for 2012.

The award is named for Sir Maurice Wilkes, the Director of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory during the development of stored program computers and inventor of many computing concepts still in use today.

Brooks will will be honored for his outstanding contributions in computer architecture at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Awards Banquet in Portland, Oregon. He will also receive a cash prize of $2,500.

Brooks’ research looks at low-level computer architecture issues involving temperature and energy and how they can be modeled and planned for early in the design process.

Awareness of these issues at the level of architecture design can lead to smaller, lighter, more efficient, and more reliable devices.

This research is relevant across the board, from high-performance servers to the tiny battery-powered devices ubiquitous to modern society.

Brooks has been at Harvard since 2002. He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a B.S. in electrical engineering from University of Southern California.

Brooks has had papers selected for IEEE Micro’s “Top Picks in Computer Architecture” special issue in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. He has also been awarded the DARPA/MTO Young Faculty Award (2007) and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2005).