Tarek El-Ghazawi of George Washington University

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 supercomputer, Summit, can perform 148,600 trillion calculations in one second (148.6 PF on LINPAC). The top two supercomputers are now in the USA followed by two Chinese supercomputers. 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. In fact the USA is planning two supercomputers in 2021 one of which, when fully operational (Frontier), will perform at 1.5 EF.   Scientists however are concerned that we are reaching many physical limits and we need new innovative ideas to make it to the next generation of computing.  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 Nuromorphic 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.  Further, I cover some of our own progress on Nanophotnonic PostMoore’s law processing efforts. 

Biography:

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 and a Distinguished Visiting Speaker for the IEEE Computer Society. 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.