Susan Eggers is first woman to receive ACM – IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award

Susan Eggers (Ph.D. ’89), the 2009 CS Distinguished Alumna, is the recipient of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award–the first woman so honored in the award’s 39 year history.  The award is administered jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is given for contributions to computer and digital systems architecture where the field of computer architecture is considered at present to encompass the combined hardware-software design and analysis of computing and digital systems.  Eggers, who is a professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was cited for “outstanding contributions to simultaneous multithreaded processor architectures and multiprocessor sharing and coherency.”  She made significant contributions to cache coherency protocols as well as other memory-related challenges in multiprocessor computers, and performed the first data-driven study of data sharing in shared-memory multiprocessors, which greatly enhanced the field’s understanding of both hardware and software coherency techniques.