SPEC Member Professor Lizy Kurian John Receives Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award

By John Henning, SPEC CPU Committee Secretary

I am extremely pleased to congratulate Professor Lizy Kurian John, IEEE Micro Editor-in-Chief and Truchard Foundation Chair at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, on receiving the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award. Professor John is well known within SPEC for her contributions to SPEC CPU, and in turn, her contribution to new CPU processor design.

New chip designs take years, requiring very large engineering investments, and SPEC benchmarks provide essential guidance for this engineering work. Dr. John has collaborated with the SPEC CPU Committee since 2004. SPEC engineers have provided her with low-level hardware profiles and she, along with her PhD students, have applied Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to produce benchmark "clusters" that SPEC has considered when selecting which benchmarks to include in SPEC products.

This work was important to the development of SPEC CPU 2006 and SPEC CPU 2017, and papers she produced after the release of these benchmarks have also helped engineers determine which benchmark subsets they should simulate as they research new processor designs.

SPEC is grateful for her contributions, and we are immensely pleased that she has been honored with the Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award.

About Dr. John

Dr. John holds 16 U. S. patents and has published 16 book chapters, approximately 300 journal and conference and workshop papers. She has coauthored books on Digital Systems Design using VHDL (Cengage Publishers 2007, 2017), Digital Systems Design using Verilog (Cengage Publishers, 2014) and has edited a book on Computer Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (CRC Press). She has also edited three books on workload characterization.

She is the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of IEEE MICRO and has served in the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimizations (TACO), IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, and IEEE Transactions on VLSI. She is a member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and ACM SIGARCH. Dr. John was named a Fellow of IEEE in 2009, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2020, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (Class of 2020).

About the Award

The Joe J. King Professional Engineering Achievement Award recognizes a faculty member at the University of Texas who has made significant contributions in furthering the profession of engineering. In the words of Mr. King: "My feeling is that the recognition should encourage faculty members to demonstrate capabilities in broadly advancing the professional practice of engineering." Thus, of primary importance is that the work of the recipient has brought credit to the profession of engineering.

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