John L. Hennessy

John L. Hennessy
Born	1953 (age 71–72)
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	State University of New York at Stony Brook Villanova University
Scientific career
Fields	Computer architecture
Institutions	Stanford University

For other people named John Hennessy, see John Hennessy.

John LeRoy Hennessy (born 1953) is an American computer scientist and academic. Hennessy is the founder of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. and is the 10th President of Stanford University.

Background

He earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University, and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Hennessy became a Stanford faculty member in 1977. In 1984, he used his sabbatical year to found MIPS Computer Systems Inc. to commercialize his research in RISC processors. In 1987, he became the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Hennessy served as director of Stanford's Computer System Laboratory (1989–1993), a research center run by Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments. He was chair of the Department of Computer Science (1994–1996) and Dean of the School of Engineering (1996–1999).

In 1999, Stanford President Gerhard Casper appointed Hennessy to succeed Condoleezza Rice as Provost of Stanford University. When Casper stepped down to focus on teaching in 2000, the Stanford Board of Trustees named Hennessy to succeed Casper as president. As Stanford's president, Hennessy earns an annual salary of $566,581.

In 1997, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM.

Hennessy is a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness.

Hennessy is a board member of Google, Cisco Systems, Atheros Communications, and the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

Research

Hennessy has a history of strong interest and involvement in college-level computer education. He co-authored, with David A. Patterson, two well-known books on computer architecture, Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, which introduced the DLX RISC architecture. They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990.

Hennessy also contributed to updating Donald Knuth's MIX processor to the MMIX. Both are model computers used in Knuth's classic series, The Art of Computer Programming. MMIX is Knuth's DLX equivalent.

Noted publications

• Hennessy, John L.; Patterson, David A. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 0123704901.
• Patterson, David A.; Hennessy, John L. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/software Interface. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 0123706068.
• Gharachorloo, Kourosh (1990). "Memory consistency and event ordering in scalable shared-memory multiprocessors". Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture. International Symposium on Computer Architecture. pp. 15–26. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Lenoski, Daniel (1990). "The directory-based cache coherence protocol for the DASH multiprocessor". Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture. International Symposium on Computer Architecture. pp. 148–159. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Official Biography from the Office of the President of Stanford University
• The Secret of Silicon Valley, John Hennessy speaks at Stanford
• GSHI.org interview with John Hennessy, concerning the video game industry (audio and text)
• Interview with John Hennessy