Back to School

Submitted by Sam on February 18, 2009 - 11:29

A long, long, long time ago I applied to graduate school. One of my top choices was the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne, which has one of the best engineering programs around. You may have heard of the web browser? Student Marc Andreessen co-wrote the first one -- well, the first usable one -- there in the early 90s. Sadly I didn't end up going to UIUC, but the school now has one of the top parallel programs in the country. So, how is this relevant to Elemental? Well, UIUC was recently named the world's first CUDA Center of Excellence by NVIDIA. Dr. Wen-mei Hwu has put together a terrific course on programming massively parallel processors, ECE498, and best of all the slides and lecture audio are all available online. When Elemental started building our GPU-accelerated video software we used Dr. Hwu's slides as a reference to get familiar with NVIDIA's GPU architecture in a hurry. It's a terrific resource for all aspiring parallel programmers. 11 years after applying, I finally had the opportunity last week to visit UIUC's campus. The university is putting on a special Parallel at Illinois seminar series, entitled "The Need for Speed: Understanding Computing Performance from an Applications Perspective." Dr. Hwu and Dr. Sanjay Patel have put together a great lineup of speakers for the series, and Elemental was honored to be included. The school has done a nice job of archiving the talks, including slides and video; it's definitely worth checking out for followers of the exciting world of massively parallel computing.