Wen-mei Hwu () is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist. He is the Senior Director of Research and Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA Corporation as well as the Walter J. Sanders III-

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Endowed Chair Professor Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

Biography

Hwu earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; zh, t=國立臺灣大學, poj=Kok-li̍p Tâi-oân Tāi-ha̍k, p=, s=) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. Founded in 1928 during Taiwan under J ...

in 1983. He then completed in 1987 a Ph.D. at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, under

Yale Patt Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex l ...

. Their CPU microarchitecture projects, HPS and HPSm were the predecessors of the form of out-of-order execution that became commercially successful with the Intel P6. For his contributions to the areas of

compiler optimization An optimizing compiler is a compiler designed to generate code that is optimized in aspects such as minimizing program execution time, memory usage, storage size, and power consumption. Optimization is generally implemented as a sequence of op ...

and computer architecture, he received the 1993

Eta Kappa Nu Eta Kappa Nu () or IEEE-HKN is the international honor society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Joining HKN is by invitation only. Membership is a lifelong designation for individuals who have distinguished them ...

Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award, the 1994 Xerox Award for Faculty Research, the 1994 University Scholar Award of the University of Illinois, the 1997

Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, the 1998 ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the 1999 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the 2001

Tau Beta Pi The Tau Beta Pi Association (commonly Tau Beta Pi, , or TBP) is the oldest engineering honor society and the second oldest collegiate honor society in the United States. It honors engineering students in American universities who have shown a ...

Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award, and the 2024

Eckert–Mauchly Award The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. It is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and Joh ...

. He served as the Franklin Woeltge Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2000 to 2004. He is a fellow of

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

and

ACM ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * IATA airport code for Arica Airport in Amazonas Department, Colombia Computing ...

. His research is on computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the

petascale Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of performing at least 1 quadrillion (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). These systems are often called petaflops systems and represent a significant leap from traditional ...

Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authorize ...

supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and is principal investigator for the first

NVIDIA Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPACT Research Group and is director of the OpenIMPACT project – which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. From 1997 to 1999, Hwu served as the chairman of the Computer Engineering Program at Illinois. Since 2009, Hwu has served as chief technology officer at MulticoreWare Inc., leading the development of compiler tools for heterogeneous platforms. The

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...

compilers developed by his team at MulticoreWare are based on the

LLVM LLVM, also called LLVM Core, is a target-independent optimizer and code generator. It can be used to develop a Compiler#Front end, frontend for any programming language and a Compiler#Back end, backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM i ...

framework and have been deployed by leading semiconductor companies. In 2020, Hwu retired after serving 33 years in

. Currently, Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

Research and Emeritus Professor at

Current Research Affiliations

Wen-mei Hwu NVIDIA Research

IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research

Blue Waters Project
at th
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

IMPACT Research Group
at th
Coordinated Science Lab
* Concurrent Theme for th
Gigascale Systems Research Center
*

Center of Excellence at Illinois

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hwu, Wen-mei American computer scientists American people of Chinese descent American people of Taiwanese descent Fellows of the IEEE 2002 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates Living people Researchers in distributed computing University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Maurice Wilkes Award winners

Biography

Current Research Affiliations

See also

References