HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced
that Bob Rau, an HP Fellow, died Tuesday, Dec. 10, at his home in
Los Altos, Calif., after a year-long struggle with cancer. Private
services have been held.
Dr. Rau, 51, was widely recognized as an expert in the field of
VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) computing, which is the basis
of today's Itanium processor family. Itanium was a joint development
effort by HP and Intel.
Many of the central architectural and compiler ideas in the VLIW
and EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) style of computing
were conceived of and developed by Rau. In 1984, before joining
HP, he co-founded Cydrome Inc. and was the chief architect of the
Cydra 5 mini-supercomputer, one of the first commercial VLIW products.
Earlier this year, his life-long achievements were recognized
by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer
Society which presented him the prestigious Eckert-Mauchly Award.
Most recently, he was named an ACM Fellow.
"The world will remember Bob for his profound technical contributions,"
said Dick Lampman, senior vice president, research, and director,
HP Labs. "Those of us fortunate enough to have known and worked
with him will also remember his intense intellectual curiosity,
his unflagging optimism and his deep humanity."
On joining HP in 1989, Rau started HP Lab's research program in
VLIW and instruction-level parallel processing. His most recent
position was director of the Compiler and Architecture Research
(CAR) program. Through 1998, CAR developed the advanced compiler
technology for EPIC. The resulting research compiler, Elcor, has
been released to the research community as part of the Trimaran
research infrastructure.
Since 1995, CAR has been working on the PICO (Program In, Chip
Out) project, whose goal is to develop the capability to take an
embedded application and to automatically design highly customized
computing hardware that is specific to that application, as well
as any compiler that might be needed.
Rau is also a Fellow of the IEEE. He has taught at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was an adjunct professor while
working at HP. He has been a consulting professor at Stanford University.
He has 15 patents and numerous research publications in the areas
of VLIW, EPIC, high-performance computing and automated computer
system design. He has also co-edited a book on instruction-level
parallelism.
Rau received his bachelor of technology degree from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and his masters and doctoral
degrees from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering.
Friends and colleagues wishing to make a donation in his memory
are asked to contribute to their favorite environmental fund.
About HP
HP is a leading global provider
of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and
businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal
computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing.
HP completed its merger transaction
involving Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information
about HP is available at http://www.hp.com/.
Editorial Contact: Dave Berman, +1 650 857 7277 dave_berman@hp.com
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