Mateo Valero, Professor of the Technical University of Catalonia and Director of Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC), has been selected as the recipient of the 2007 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism. He will be formally presented with the award at the 34th International Symposium on Computer Architecture 2007 (ISCA 2007) to held in San Diego. Prof. Valero is the first Spaniard and the second European after Prof. Maurice V. Wilkes from the University of Cambridge to receive this honor, known as the most prestigious award in the computer architecture community.

Every year the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society jointly present the Eckert-Mauchly Award for outstanding contributions to computer and digital systems architecture. This award was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of the first large scale electronic computing machine, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC, in 1947. Calling the award the highest honor which can be bestowed in the field of computer architecture, Prof. Mateo Valero says that receiving this award is to recognize the effort of a lot of people who collaborated with me and, especially, my PhD students.

Other computer architects that received this award were Joseph A. Fisher (2003), pioneer of the VLIW processors; John Hennessy (2001), President of the University of Stanford and architect for the MIPS microprocessor; Tadashi Watanabe (1998), Program director of the Earth Simulator Supercomputer; Yale N. Patt (1996), Professor of the University of Texas and pioneer of the design of the superscalar processors such as Pentium; Burton J. Smith (1991), pioneer in the development of multiprocessors systems and multithreaded processors; Seymour Cray (1989), pioneer in the development of vector supercomputers; Gordon C. Bell (1982) chief architect of multiple machines of the series PDP from Digital, among others.

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