Computer Systems Organization

Pioneers whose defining contribution is the structural design of a computing machine or its systems level arrangement: instruction sets, memory hierarchies, multiprocessor and distributed system architectures, and the machines built to house them, the area Computer Systems Organization covers under the ACM Computing Classification System. This group folds together what earlier stood as four separate pioneer fields: Computer Architecture (Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, John von Neumann's stored program report, Konrad Zuse's Z3, Seymour Cray's supercomputers, Sophie Wilson's ARM instruction set), Distributed Computing (Leslie Lamport's foundational distributed systems papers, Nancy Lynch's theory of distributed computing, Joe Armstrong's fault tolerant Erlang), Parallel Computing (Danny Hillis's Connection Machine, Charles E. Leiserson's Cilk, Jack Dongarra's numerical libraries for high performance computing) and Embedded Systems (Kevin Ashton's Internet of Things coinage, Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing). Does not belong here: a pioneer whose defining work is the software layer that runs on a machine rather than the machine or system's own structure, filed under Software and Its Engineering, or the language a programmer writes in, also filed there.