Thomas Wenisch Honored with U-M Henry Russel Award

Prof. Thomas F. Wenisch has been selected to receive the Henry Russel Award, one of the highest honors the university bestows upon faculty members early in their academic careers who already have demonstrated an extraordinary record of accomplishment in scholarly research and/or creativity, as well as an excellent record of contribution as a teacher.

Prof. Wenisch’s research is focused on high-performance computer architecture with particular emphasis on energy/power efficiency, data center architecture, smartphone/handheld architecture, memory systems, and performance evaluation methodology. His work seeks to enhance the performance and reduce the energy consumption, capital costs, and carbon footprint of cloud infrastructure by improving efficiency at all scales, from client devices and server systems to facility-scale power and cooling infrastructure. Projects that he has undertaken include computational sprinting, a hardware/software technique for creating bursts of processing power; projects aimed at the design of efficient data centers; multiprocessor memory design; and projects aimed at improving performance evaluation methodology.

Prof. Wenisch’s research has attracted substantial external funding; in one year’s time he obtained two grants from the National Science Foundation and two grants from Google, notable achievements for faculty members at any level. During his six years at U-M he has received 12 grants. Four papers that he has co-authored since Feb. 2012 have been judged as best papers (ASPLOS 2013, HPCA 2013, ISPASS 2012, HPCA 2012).

Prof. Wenisch received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and joined the faculty at Michigan that year. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2009 and was named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Assistant Professor of EECS in 2011. Prof. Wenisch was recognized in the International Symposium of Computer Architecture Hall of Fame in 2011 for having eight or more papers in ISCA. He is inventor on one patent and co-inventor on six patents.