In his Ph.D. dissertation, Fisher created the Trace Scheduling compiler algorithm and coined the term Instruction-level parallelism to characterize VLIW, superscalar, dataflow and other architecture styles that involve fine-grained parallelism among simple machine-level instructions.

Trace scheduling was the first practical algorithm to find large amounts of parallelism between instructions that occupied different basic blocks.

Because of the difficulty of applying trace scheduling to idiosyncratic systems (such as 1970s-era DSPs) that in theory should have been suitable targets for a trace scheduling compiler, Fisher put forward the VLIW architectural style.

VLIWs are normal computers, designed to run compiled code and used like ordinary computers, but offering large amounts of instruction-level parallelism scheduled by a trace scheduling or similar compiler.

[4] [5] [6] [7] Multiflow was founded to commercialize trace scheduling and VLIW architectures, then widely thought to be impractical.