Peng Wu received her doctoral degree in Computer Science at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2001. Her doctoral study focused on automatic parallelization, pointer analysis, and dependence analysis. As a student, she has interned twice at T.J. Watson research center, working on optimization of scientific Java programs in the NINJA project.
Upon graduation, Dr. Wu joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member. She was part of the CELL compiler project since its inception. In the early days, Dr. Wu was heavily involved in the early prototyping of the XL compiler backend (TOBEY) for the CELL architecture. She also played a key role in defining the SPE intrinsic.
In order to exploit the SIMD aspect of the CELL architecture, Dr. Wu has directed her research efforts to address compilation issues from vectorizing for SIMD architectures (a.k.a simdization) since 2003. The issues include memory alignment, various sources of parallelism, simdization profitability, etc. Currently, Dr. Wu leads the effort to build a general simdization infrastructure that targets a variety of SIMD units in IBM processor family including the CELL, VMX for PPC970 and Dual FPU unit for BlueGene. This effort has resulted in the first product release of XL compiler with simdization capability for VMX (C/C++ V7 and Fortran V9), a string of top-tier publications, and more than a dozen patents.