Wen Mei Hwu
Wen-mei Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair Emeritus and professor emeritus of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, retired after over 30 years of service to the university in 2020. (1-2) Previously, he held numerous academic and professional positions such as acting department head of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Chief Scientist at the Parallel Computing Institute at UIUC, Sanders III Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, director of the CUDA Center of Excellence at NVIDIA, and multiple professorships in Electrical & Computer Engineering beginning in 1996. (1-2)
In addition to the numerous academic and professional positions he held over his career, Wen-mei Hwu has contributed significantly to the curation of UIUC engineering students, its electrical & computer engineering curriculum, and engineering research itself. For example, Hwu developed ECE 508: Parallel Algorithm Techniques and ECE 408: Applied Parallel Programming, which is still part of the engineering curriculum. He also developed an online course, Heterogeneous Parallel Programming, which over 70,000 people took.(2) One of his most notable scientific contributions is summarized succinctly in the following quotation from NVIDIA's website:
"Hwu and his Illinois team developed the superblock compiler scheduling and optimization framework that has been adopted by virtually all modern vendor and open-source compilers today." (1)
Adding even further to his esteem of this distinguished scholar's plethora of achievements are the numerous research and teaching awards he has won and a co-author credit on an extremely popular textbook called "Programming Massively Parallel Processors - a Hands-on Approach. " This textbook was co-authored with the then Chief Scientist of NVIDIA, David Kirk. (1-2)
In regards to the numerous awards Hwu has won for his research, he has received the following: the ACM SigArch Maurice Wilkes Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, the ISCA Influential Paper Award, the MICRO Test-of-Time Award, the IEEE Computer Society B. R. Rau Award, the CGO Test-of-Time Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award in CS of the University of California, Berkeley. (NVIDIA)
The awards he has received in the field of teaching and education are as follows: the National-level HKN Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, the ECE Department Outstanding Teacher Award, the College of Engineering Collins Award of Innovative Teaching, and the College of Engineering Rose Award for Teaching Excellence. (1)
Throughout his long and storied career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Wen-mei Hwu has significantly contributed to the university. After retirement, he joined NVIDIA, a software company, as Senior Research Scientist. (1)