computer science

Wen-mei Hwu

Wen-mei Hwu is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Wen-mei Hwu rather than just read about it. In short: Wen-mei Hwu (Chinese: 胡文美; pinyin: Hú Wénměi) is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist. He is the Senior Director of Research and Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA Corporation as well as the Walter J.

Key takeaways

Wen-mei Hwu belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Wen-mei Hwu to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Wen-mei Hwu from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Wen-mei Hwu (Chinese: 胡文美; pinyin: Hú Wénměi) is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist. He is the Senior Director of Research and Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA Corporation as well as the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair Professor Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Biography Hwu earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1983. He then completed in 1987 a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, under Yale Patt. Their CPU microarchitecture projects, HPS and HPSm were the predecessors of the form of out-of-order execution that became commercially successful with the Intel P6. 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 Xerox Award for Faculty Research, 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, and the 2024 Eckert–Mauchly Award. He served as the Franklin Woeltge Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2000 to 2004. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM. His research is on computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPACT Research Group and is director of the OpenIMPACT project – which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. From 1997 to 1999, Hwu served as the chairman of the Computer Engineering Program at Illinois. Since 2009, Hwu has served as chief technology officer at MulticoreWare Inc., leading the development of compiler tools for heterogeneous platforms. The OpenCL compilers developed by his team at MulticoreWare are based on the LLVM framework and have been deployed by leading semiconductor companies. In 2020, Hwu retired after serving 33 years in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at Nvidia Research and Emeritus Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Current Research Affiliations Wen-mei Hwu NVIDIA Research IBM-Illinois Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research Blue Waters Project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) IMPACT Research Group at the Coordinated Science Lab Concurrent Theme for the Gigascale Systems Research Center CUDA Center of Excellence at Illinois

See also Wen-mei Hwu's Homepage Parallel Computing Research at Illinois: The UPCRC Agenda Archived 2008-12-07 at the Wayback Machine Parallel@Illinois Archived 2018-10-05 at the Wayback Machine Electrical and Computing Engineering at Illinois First Virtual School on Computational Science and Engineering: GPUs and Multicores - led by Wen-mei Hwu and David Kirk (Summer 2008) University of Illinois NVIDIA CUDA Course taught by Wen-mei Hwu and David Kirk (9 March 2007) Wen-mei Hwu: Chief Technology Officer, MulticoreWare Inc. Wen-mei Hwu Receives the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Wen-mei Hwu

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Wen-mei Hwu claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Wen-mei Hwu before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Wen-mei Hwu ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Wen-mei Hwu

In research: Wen-mei Hwu appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Wen-mei Hwu in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Wen-mei Hwu is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American computer scientists, American people of Chinese descent, American people of Taiwanese descent, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Wen-mei Hwu outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Wen-mei Hwu in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Wen-mei Hwu means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Wen-mei Hwu out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Wen-mei Hwu in simple terms?

Why does Wen-mei Hwu matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Wen-mei Hwu?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Wen-mei Hwu.