Tarek El-Ghazawi, IEEE Fellow and Professor

The George Washington University

Rebooting Computing- The Search for Post-Moore’s Law Computing Systems
The field of high-performance computing (HPC) or supercomputing refers to the building and using computing systems that are orders of magnitude faster than our common systems. The top supercomputers are achieving hundreds of petaFLOPS, hundreds of thousands of trillion operations per second. However, they are consuming enormous levels of energy. On the other hand, many countries are racing to break the record and build an ExaFLOP supercomputer that can perform more than one million trillion (quintillion) calculations per second. Scientists however are concerned that we are end of the road for performance increases using current technologies. New innovative ideas of how to do computing in the future may be necessary to make it to the next generation of computing beyond the ExaFLOPS. This talk will consider where we stand and where we ae going with the current state of supercomputing with emphasis on future processors, and some of the ideas that scientists are looking at to re-invent computing. A comparative understanding of Neuromorphic and Brain-Inspired Computing, Quantum Computing and innovative computing paradigms will be provided along with an assessment of progress so far and the road ahead.

Biography of the Speaker:
Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University, where he leads the university-wide Strategic Academic Program in High- Performance Computing. He is the founding director of The GW Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and was a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). El-Ghazawi’s interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable and embedded computing, nanophontonic based computing. He is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC parallel programming language. At present he is leading and co-leading efforts for Post-Moore’s Law processors including analog, nanophotonic and neuromorphic computing. Professor El-Ghazawi is a Fellow of the IEEE and selected as a Research Faculty Fellow of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies and a UK Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellow. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technical Innovation, The IEEE Outstanding Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing, and the GW SEAS Distinguished Researcher Award. El-Ghazawi has served as a senior U.S. Fulbright Scholar and as a distinguished speaker in the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visiting Program.