B. Ramakrishna (Bob) Rau is a senior research scientist at HP Labs, where he holds the title of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Scientist. He is also the manager of HP Labs’ Compiler and Architecture Research (CAR) group.
On joining HP in 1989, Bob started HP Lab’s research program in VLIW and instruction-level parallel (ILP) processing. This resulted in the development of the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) style of architecture that is the basis for the IA-64. Bob’s current research interests lie in evolving and adapting the EPIC architecture and compiler technologies, and the systolic array technology, to enable the automatic architecting of custom, application-specific, embedded processors.
Bob was a co-founder of Cydrome Inc. which developed and productized one of the first VLIW mini-supercomputers, the Cydra 5. He has taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he currently is an Adjunct Professor. He has twelve patents, numerous research publications in the area of VLIW 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 Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University.
Bob’s primary contributions to Trimaran have been to create the environment which enabled the research leading to the development of EPIC, HPL-PD and Elcor, and in forging the research relationships with the University of Illinois and New York University which have resulted in Trimaran. He has made contributions to Elcor/Trimaran on topics such as region-based compiling, dynamic single assignment (DSA) and expanded virtual registers (EVRs), modulo scheduling, rotating register allocation, and machine description databases for machine description-driven compilation.
