Bob Rau is a senior research scientist at HP Labs, where he holds the title of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Scientist (HP's highest technical position).He is a pioneer in the field of VLIW computing, having been active in this area since its inception in 1980. Many of the central architectural and compiler ideas in the VLIW and EPIC style of computing were conceived of, and developed, by him. In 1984, prior to joining HP, Bob co-founded Cydrome Inc. and was the Chief Architect of the Cydra 5 mini-supercomputer, one of the very first commercial VLIW products.
On joining HP in 1989, Bob started HP Lab's research program in VLIW and instruction-level parallel (ILP) processing. This research program developed the underlying philosophy, as well as the core architectural concepts of what is now known as the EPIC style of architecture, which is the basis of the HP-Intel alliance and Intel's IA-64 architecture.
Bob currently heads up HP Labs' Compiler and Architecture Research (CAR) group which performs long-range research for products that are from five to ten years into the future. Through 1998, CAR developed the advanced compiler technology for EPIC. The resulting research compiler, Elcor, has been released as part of the Trimaran research infrastructure. Since 1995, CAR has also 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.
Bob has taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been a Consulting Professor at Stanford and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois. He has thirteen patents and numerous research publications in the area of VLIW and high-performance computing, and has co-edited a book on instruction-level parallelism. He received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and his MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering.
Last modified: April 8, 1999