Wen-mei Hwu received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, 1987. He is the Walter J. (“Jerry”) Sanders III-Advanced Micro Devices endowed chair of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the areas of architecture, implementation, software for high-performance computer systems, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator (PI) for the petascale Blue Waters system, a codirector of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and PI for the world’s first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence. He is the chief scientist of the Illinois Parallel Computing Institute and the director of the IMPACT lab.
For his contributions to the areas of compiler optimization and computer architecture, he received the 1993 Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award, the 1994 University Scholar Award of the University of Illinois, the 1997 Eta Kappa Nu Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, the 1998 ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the 1999 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the 2001 Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award, the 2006 most influential ISCA paper award, and the University of California, Berkeley distinguished alumni in computer science award. From 1997 to 1999, he was the chairman of the Computer Engineering Program at the University of Illinois. In 2007, he introduced a new engineering course in massively parallel processing with David Kirk of NVIDIA. He is a fellow of IEEE and of the ACM.