Faculty

Hank is Professor Emeritus and Wissner-Slivka Chair Emeritus in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He led CSE for 14 years through a period of major growth, from 2006 through 2019, first as Chair of the Department and then as the founding Director of the Paul G. Allen School at its creation in 2017.

Hank’s research projects concern operating systems, distributed systems, security, the world-wide web, and computer architecture. With his colleague Susan Eggers and their students, he developed the first commercially viable multithreaded architecture, Simultaneous Multithreading, adopted by Intel (as Hyperthreading), IBM, Sun and others. Before joining UW in 1983, he launched his career at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an early computer manufacturer, where he worked on commercial operating systems and system architecture. The author of two books and more than 100 papers on computer systems design, his publications have earned nearly 20 best-paper and “test of time” awards in operating systems and computer architecture. Hank has supervised 27 Ph.D. students, many of whom now hold academic appointments or positions in major industrial research labs.

Hank is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and recipient of a Fulbright Research Scholar Award (spent at INRIA, France). He is former chair of ACM SIGOPS (the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems), former program chair of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), The USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), and the IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS).

He has co-founded two companies — Skytap, a Seattle cloud-computing company, and Performant, Inc., a Java-based performance management company that was acquired by Mercury in 2003. He has served on Technical Advisory Boards of Isilon Systems, Zillow.com, Turi, Alibaba, and Madrona Venture Group. He served as the CSE project leader for the design and construction of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering (2003) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Center (2019), and is art curator for the Allen School art collection.

Hank is currently Distinguished Engineer and Co-Director of the SystemsResearch Group at Google (SRG).