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José Martínez
"My work is about being optimistic," says Martínez, a two-time winner of Spanish government’s prestigious National Academic Excellence Award and a member of Phi Kappa Phi honor society. "The problem of running things in parallel, making sure processors do not conflict on data, is a very hard one. There had been some significant research, but in the end all these methods were taking a very conservative approach, because people thought it was the only safe way. So I took the opposite view—doing things optimistically and recovering from mistakes on the fly." His strategy worked, and his solution is the kind of cutting-edge technology that is just starting to reach the market with a new chip capable of optimistically executing two threads at the same time. Martínez hopes to keep expanding his research, with continued work on parallel computer architecture, thread-level speculation, processing in heterogeneous architectures, and interaction between hardware and software. "Initially, my idea was to go back to Spain to be a professor there," say Martínez, who lives in Ithaca with his wife, a computer programmer, and spends his free time cooking and playing Spanish guitar. "When I first came to the United States for my PhD, I wanted to become a better professor. But later on, I decided the opportunity here was too good to pass up. The thing I like most is the freedom you can get as a professor. You arrive here, and you have total freedom to do what you like." |
Computer equipment was scarce at Spain’s Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, where José Martínez studied as an undergraduate. To gain access to a workstation and email, he fought his way into the graduate research lab, beginning independent research years ahead of his classmates. Since then, he’s settled in the United States, earning master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and coming to work at Cornell, where he focuses on multiprocessor computer architectures.