" Reinventing Computing"

Abstract:

The many-core inflection point presents a new challenge for our industry, namely general-purpose parallel computing. Unless this challenge is met, the continued growth and importance of computing itself and of the businesses engaged in it are at risk. We must make parallel programming easier and more generally applicable than it is now, and build hardware and software that will execute arbitrary parallel programs on whatever scale of system the user has. The changes needed to accomplish this are significant and affect computer architecture, the entire software development tool chain, and the army of application developers that will rely on those tools to develop parallel applications. This talk will point out a few of the hard problems that face us and some prospects for addressing them.

Bio:

Burton J. Smith, Technical Fellow for Microsoft Corporation, works with various groups within the company to help define and expand efforts in the areas of parallel and high performance computing. He reports directly to Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for the company.

Smith is recognized as an international leader in high performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. Before joining Microsoft in December 2005 he co-founded Cray Inc., formerly Tera Computer Company. From its inception in1988, Smith served as its chief scientist, a member of the board of directors, and its chairman until 1999.
Before that, Smith spent six years with Denelcor, Inc. as Vice President of Research & Development and three years as a Fellow of the Institute for Defense Analyses Supercomputing Research Center. From 1970 to 1979 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado.

In 2003, Smith received the Seymour Cray Computing Engineering Award from the IEEE Computer Society and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1991 given jointly by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery and was elected a fellow of each organization in 1994. Smith attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a BSEE degree, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned SM, EE, and Sc.D degrees.

For more information please contact David Bader.

Snacks will be provided.
We hope to see you all!