How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

Hennessy's original research area was optimizing compilers. His research group at Stanford developed many of the techniques now in commercial use. In 1981, Hennessy started the MIPS project at Stanford with a handful of graduate students. After completing the project in 1984, he took a one-year sabbatical to co-found MIPS Computer Systems, which has since merged with Silicon Graphics. The RISC architecture developed at MIPS has been utilized by a number of companies including DEC, NEC, Siemens, Silicon Graphics, and Tandem. Hennessy's current research at Stanford focuses on the area of designing and exploiting multiprocessors. Most recently, he has been involved in the development of the DASH multiprocessor architecture.