Speaker Biographical Information

Dr. Tilak Agerwala is Vice President, Systems at IBM Research. He is responsible for developing the next-generation technologies for IBM’s systems, from microprocessors to commercial systems and supercomputers, as well as novel supercomputing algorithms and applications.

Tilak joined IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center and has held executive positions at IBM in research, advanced development, development, marketing, and business development. His research interests are in the area of high performance computer architectures and systems.

Tilak received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE in 1998 for “outstanding contributions to the development of high performance computers”. He is a founding member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT where in the late eighties his group, in collaboration with Motorola, built the Monsoon dataflow machines and its associated software. In 2000, Arvind started Sandburst which got sold to Broadcom in 2006. In 2003, Arvind co-founded Bluespec Inc., an EDA company to produce a set of tools for high-level synthesis. In 2001, Dr. R. S. Nikhil and Arvind published the book "Implicit parallel programming in pH". Arvind's current research interests are synthesis and verification of large digital systems described using Guarded Atomic Actions; and Memory Models for parallel architectures and languages.

Doug Burger is an Associate Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas. He received his PhD from the UW-Madison Computer Sciences Department in 1998. He co-leads the TRIPS project at UT-Austin, and is the recipient of the 2006 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award.

Bijan Davari received his M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1984. He then joined IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he worked on various aspects of scaled CMOS and BiCMOS technologies, including device scaling and process integration. He defined and developed a selectively scaled 0.25 micron CMOS technology at 2.5V, demonstrating significant performance and power reduction improvement over CMOS technologies at 3.3V. This work has set the direction and the supply voltage for the post 3.3V CMOS generations.

Dr. Davari was appointed IBM Fellow in 1996 for “His leadership in CMOS technology scaling. His work has profoundly influenced both the logic technology in current IBM systems and the direction of ongoing CMOS research, leading the way to high-performance and low-power.”

In 1998 he was appointed Vice President of Technology and Emerging Products, leading IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center (SRDC) at Hopewell Junction, NY. His team has been responsible for the definition and development of industry leading technologies such as Copper Interconnect, Silicon on Insulator (SOI), and High-Performance Logic based Embedded DRAM technologies.

In August 2003, he was named Vice President of Next Generation Computing Systems/Technology. In his new capacity, Dr. Davari leads the efforts for the definition and then implementation of IBM’s next generation family of systems for 2008-2012. The goal is to maintain and expand IBM’s system leadership in new system architecture, employing massively multi-threading and special function engines (accelerators) . This activity integrates IBM’s vast technical disciplines in Hardware and Software (e.g. silicon, packaging, cooling, system architecture, design tools, compliers, middleware, etc.) with the Client Requirements/Applications (both for scale up and scale out).

He has authored and co-authored over 70 publications in various aspects of semiconductor devices and technology, is an IEEE fellow and winner of JJ Ebers award.

Wen-mei W. Hwu 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, and software for high performance computer systems. He is the director of the IMPACT research group (www.crhc.uiuc.edu/Impact). For his contributions in research and teaching, he received the Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award, the Xerox Award for Faculty Research, the University Scholar Award of the University of Illinois, the Eta Kappa Nu Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award, and ISCA Most Influential Paper Award. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. Hwu serves on the Executive Committee of the MARCO/DARPA C2S2 (www.c2s2.org) and GSRC (www.gigascale.org) Focus Research Centers. He co-leads the GSRC Soft Systems Theme with Kurt Keutzer. He also serves on the GELATO Strategy Council (www.gelato.org). Dr. Hwu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Beng-Hong Lim is a Senior Director of R&D at VMware where he is responsible for the architecture and development of VMware's server virtualization technologies. He joined VMware in 1998 and was a key developer of the initial versions of VMware's Workstation and ESX Server products. Prior to VMware, he was a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received a PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 1994 and has over 20 research publications in the areas of computer architecture, operating systems, and virtualization.

Josep Torrellas (iacoma.cs.uiuc.edu) is a Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois. Prior to being at Illinois, he received a PhD from Stanford University. He also spent a sabbatical period as Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. Torrellas's research area is computer architecture, focusing on multiprocessor organization, speculative multithreading, and architectural support for hardware reliability and software debuggability. He has been involved in the Stanford DASH and the Illinois Cedar multiprocessor projects, and lead the Illinois Aggressive COMA and FlexRAM Intelligent Memory projects. He has published over 120 papers in computer architecture. Torrellas is an IEEE Fellow and the Chairman of IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA).