Susan J. Eggers is an American computer scientist known for her work on computer architecture and compilers.
Eggers is best known for her important work in developing and helping to make practical use of simultaneous multithreaded (SMT) processors, one of the most significant advancements in computer architecture in the past 30 years. In the mid-1990s, Moore's Law was active, and engineers were adding up to 1 billion transistors to computer chips. However, simply increasing the number of transistors and memory did not lead to major improvements in computer performance. Eggers was among those who believed that improving parallelism, or a computer's ability to handle many tasks at the same time, was the best way to increase performance.
In 2006, Eggers was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her work on designing and testing new types of computer processors.
Biography
Eggers earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Connecticut College in 1965. She later earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.
In 1989, she began working in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is now an Emeritus Professor at that university.
Awards
Eggers has received several important awards, including:
- The Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2018, which is the most respected award in the computer architecture field. She won it for her work on designing computer systems that allow multiple tasks to run at the same time and manage shared resources. She was the first woman to receive this award.
- ACM Fellow in 2002 for her work on designing and analyzing computers that can handle multiple tasks and shared memory systems, along with tools that help computers process instructions more efficiently.
- IEEE Fellow in 2003
- ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award in 2009
- AAAS Fellow in 2006
- She was chosen as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2006
- She received the ISCA Influential Paper Award in 2010 and 2011 for papers she co-authored in 1995 and 1996, which were presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.