Maurice Herlihy Joins Dijkstra, Needham, And Others In The SIGOPS Hall Of Fame
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on Oct. 6, 2015
Selected by past program chairs from leading Operating Systems conferences, past Weiser and Turing Award winners from the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) community, and more, Professor Maurice Herlihy of Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (and his collaborator, J. Eliot B. Moss of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) has just received the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award.
SIGOPS instituted the honor in 2005 to recognize the most influential Operating Systems papers from at least ten years in the past, and winners are chosen following a discussion that considers the impact that the paper and its research have had on the field. In this case, the award recognizes the lasting contribution that Maurice made with the invention of transactional memory, a multiprocessor architecture that provided efficiencies to lock-free synchronization that had previously only been available in techniques based on mutual exclusion, and that widely outperformed existing locking techniques of the time.
The award continues a string of remarkable recent successes for Maurice, including being elected a National Academy of Inventors Fellow and being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The photo above is by Jonathan Mace and used with permission.
