Bio

Wen-mei W. Hwu is a Professor and holds the Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in the area of architecture, implementation, compilation, and algorithms for parallel computing. He is the chief scientist of Parallel Computing Institute and director of the IMPACT research group ( impact.crhc.illinois.edu). He is a co-founder and CTO of MulticoreWare. For his contributions in research and teaching, he received the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Eta Kappa Nu Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, the CAM/IEEE ISCA Influential Paper Award, and the Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science of the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. He directs the UIUC CUDA Center of Excellence and serves as one of the principal investigators of the $208M NSF Blue Waters Petascale computer project. Dr. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2007, Hwu teamed up with then NVIDIA Chief Scientist David Kirk to create a course called Programming Massively Parallel Processors ( https://ece408.hwu.crhc.illinois.edu). Thousands of students worldwide follow the course through the web site each semester. The course material has also been used by numerous universities including MIT, Stanford, and Georgia Tech. Hwu and Kirk have also been teaching a VSCSE Summer School version to science and engineering graduate students from all over the world. In 2008, 50 graduates from 17 countries and three continents attended the summer school ( http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/events/GPUMulticore/) in Urbana with another 60 participating remotely. Students in the summer school come from diverse disciplines. In 2009, the summer school was again fully subscribed with 160 students from multiple continents. The 2010 offering was attended by 220 students at four sites linked with HD video. The 2011 attendance further increased to 280 at 10 sites across the U.S. The 2012 summer school is projected to have more than 320 students at 10 linked sites. Due to popular demand, Hwu and Kirk have also been teaching abbreviated versions of their course globally, most recently at the Chinese Academy of Science in 2008, Berkeley in 2010, Braga Portugal in 2010, and Chile in 2011. They have also collaborated with UPC/Barcelona Supercomputing Center to offer an EU PUMPS summer school in Barcelona every year since 2010. In February 2010, Hwu and Kirk published a textbook on programming massively parallel processors. The book has been extremely popular, with more than 10,000 copies sold to date. International editions and translations are available in China, India, Japan, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The second edition is already in production.