Dr. Behrooz Parhami

Virtual Meeting

IEEE Denver Computer, Information Theory, and Robotics Society – Technical Meeting

11 November 2021 @ 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM MT

Denver IEEE Computer Society Guest Lecturer,

Dr. Behrooz Parhami

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Lecturer

University of California, Santa Barbara

Behrooz Parhami earned a PhD in computer science from University of California, Los Angeles, 1973. Currently Dr. Parhami is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and former Associate Dean for Academic Personnel, College of Engineering, at University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously Dr. Parhami was also involved in educational planning, curriculum development, standardization efforts, technology transfer, and various editorial responsibilities, including a five-year term as Editor of Computer Report, technical journal of the Informatics Society of Iran, which he helped found in 1979.

Dr Parhami has published over 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. Among his publications are textbooks on parallel processing (1999), computer arithmetic (2000; 2nd ed. 2010), and computer architecture (2005). Professor Parhami is a Life Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IET, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of AAIA, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and American Society for Engineering Education, and a Distinguished Member of the Informatics Society of Iran, for which he served as a founding member and President. Professor Parhami has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Trans. Sustainable Computing (since 2016), IEEE Trans. Computers, IEEE Trans. Parallel and Distributed Systems, and International J. Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.

Dr Parhami’s research interests are computer arithmetic, parallel processing, and dependable computing.

Abstract: Computer architecture became an established discipline when the stored-program concept was incorporated into bare-bones computers of the 1940s. Since then, the field has seen multiple minor and major innovations in each decade. I will present my pick of the most important innovation in each of the eight decades, from the 1940s to the 2010s, and show how these ideas, when connected to each other and allowed to interact and cross-fertilize, produced the phenomenal growth of computer performance, now approaching exa-op/s (billion billion operations per second) level, as well as to ultra-low-energy and single-chip systems. I will also offer predictions for what to expect in the 2020s and beyond.