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Tarek El-Ghazawitarek el-ghazawi
The Promise and Challenges of High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

A rising trend in supercomputing technology has been the High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC) systems, where the synergy between high-performance computing and reconfigurable hardware computing, based on FPGAs, is exploited. Such systems inherently support fine-grain and coarse-grain parallelism, and can potentially tune their architecture dynamically. In addition to the rich body of research work, commercial reconfigurable supercomputers from Cray, SGI and SRC are now available. As this class of architectures offers the ability to tailor hardware under the control of programs to fit the underlying application, some applications have shown orders of magnitude improvements in performance, cost, size and energy. Some applications are still not doing as well and productivity is still an issue. In this talk, we characterize the advances in this field, highlighting the benefits, potential as well as the challenges.

Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University. He is the founding director of the GWU Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technology (IMPACT) and a founder and Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). Dr. El-Ghazawi�s research interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable and embedded computing, and applications to remote sensing. He has received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from New Mexico State University in 1988. Tarek El-Ghazawi is the first author of the UPC book that interprets the language, from John Wiley and Sons. He has published over a 150 refereed research publications in these areas.

Dr. El-Ghazawi is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers and has been a guest editor for IEEE Computer and the IEEE Concurrency. He is a program co-chair of the International Conference on Field Programmable Technology (ICFPT2008), Workshop and Panel Co-chair for ACM/SIGDA FPGA 2008, and a general co-chair for the Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS2008). El-Ghazawi�s research has been supported by many government and industrial organizations including NSF, NASA, DARPA, AFRL, IBM and SGI. Dr. El-Ghazawi has received the IBM faculty award in 2004. He has been serving as a consultant and on technical/science advisory boards for many government and industrial organizations. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the ACM and Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline LeMoigne-Stewart