Background
Emer, Joel was born on March 2, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Jerome and Jean Emer.
Emer, Joel was born on March 2, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Jerome and Jean Emer.
Doctor Emer received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Professor Edward South. Davidson.
He is currently a researcher at Nvidia, and was formerly an Intel Fellow. He was the 2009 recipient of the Eckert–Mauchly Award, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers joint award for contributions to computer and digital systems architecture. His first job immediately after graduation was at Digital Equipment Corporation where he initially worked on VAX performance evaluation and then on Alpha performance evaluation.
As a consequence of his performance evaluation work, he became a pioneer in the quantitative approach to computer architecture.
In conjunction with the development and application of various performance analysis techniques, he contributed a variety of research and advanced development ideas that were incorporated into various VAX and Alpha designs. He is well known, along with his co-author Douglas West. Clark, for a seminal paper on the quantitative analysis of processor architectures, which was published in the 11th International Symposium on Computer Architecture.
That paper also contained the result that the VAX-11/780"s performance was actually 0.5 MIPS instead of 1 MIPS as was previously claimed by DEC. That result helped popularize what Clark called the Iron Law of Performance that related cycles per instruction (Consumer price index), frequency and number of instructions to computer performance. Doctor Emer has also contributed to simultaneous multithreading (SMT), memory dependence prediction via store sets, soft error analysis, and led the development of the Asim simulator.
Fellow: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Married Robin Burrows, November 8, 1981. Children: David, Aaron.