Scott Mahlke recognized with B. Ramakrishna Rau Award for accomplishments in microarchitecture

Professor Scott Mahlke has received the B. Ramakrishna Rau Award from the IEEE Computer Society.  Established in memory of B. Ramakrishna Rau, the award is given in recognition of Rau’s distinguished career in promoting and expanding the use of innovative computer microarchitecture techniques, including his innovation in compiler technology, his leadership in academic and industrial computer architecture, and his extremely high personal and ethical standards.

The Rau Award honors Mahlke for his continued work in compiler technology for instruction-level parallelism and application-specific architectures.

Mahlke’s research focuses on compilers and computer architecture with a focus on energy-efficient computer systems, machine learning, reliable system design, graphics processing units, and deep neural networks. He has active research projects with several companies including ARM, Huawei, and Samsung. The goal of Mahlke’s research group, Compilers Creating Custom Processors (CCCP), is to design customized processors, accelerators, and systems consisting of both that are higher performance, lower power and more reliable.

In 2018, Mahlke and his former students Mehrzad Samadi and Ankit Sethia founded Parabricks, a startup which employed high-performance GPU-based bioinformatics software solutions for analyses of next-generation sequencing data with high throughput and high-speed turnaround. Parabricks’ software integrated seamlessly with state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, Mahlke said, and enabled users to focus on extracting insights from data. NVIDIA Healthcare  acquired Parabricks in 2020.  Parabricks continues to assist in providing accelerated tools for major established genomic analyses, supporting all major versions of these packages in the long term, and including enterprise grade support to many major institutions.

Mahlke is named on over 20 patents. A paper co-authored by Mahlke was recognized in 2006 as an influential paper in the field by ACM/IEEE, and in 2015 he earned a Micro Test of Time award for his groundbreaking 1992 paper on the hyperblock. In 2021, Mahlke and his co-authors were awarded a Best Paper at the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and has been recognized at the University of Michigan with the Monroe-Brown Foundation Education Excellence Award and with the Ted Kennedy Family Team Excellence Award, both from the College of Engineering, as well as with an Outstanding Achievement Award from the EECS Department. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM.