Department Chair Re-Elected to Lead IEEE Computer Architecture Committee

Jean-Luc Gaudiot, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was re-elected chair of the Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, a research and advisory arm of the IEEE. Since his initial election in 2001, he has spearheaded the development of challenging ideas for the design of new and advanced computer architectures.

The Technical Committee on Computer Architecture is involved in research and development and the integrated hardware and software design of general- and special-purpose uniprocessors and parallel computers. The committee annually sponsors/cosponsors the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, the High Performance Computer Architecture Conference (HPCA), and with the ACM SIGARCH, it jointly administers the Eckert-Mauchly Award given for contributions to computer architecture. It also cosponsors many other meetings, including Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computations, the Annual Supercomputing Conference, the Annual Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, as well as many other workshops.

Under Gaudiot's leadership, the committee has been reinforcing its traditional emphasis on inclusiveness.

"Encouraging new ideas and promoting uncharted research directions has remained at the forefront by furthering the presence of TCCA across interdisciplinary new meetings in response to emerging and innovative areas of technology," Gaudiot says. "A strong, technically diverse TCCA has been incorporating emerging fields such as communications, embedded systems, semiconductor technology-driven innovations and many others, and retains these as an integral part of the mandate of TCCA. The committee has also been associated with new meetings, including burgeoning but active communities, such as Brazil. This cosmopolitan involvement of computer architects is encouraging and should continue growing as TCCA's main conferences find non-US venues. For instance, HPCA will be located in Madrid next year, with an all Spanish team."

Gaudiot, an expert in low power design for microprocessors and computer architecture techniques such as Simultaneous Multi-Threading, has been a fellow of the IEEE since 1999. From 1999-2002, he was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, one of the premier research journals in computer science and engineering.

With nearly 100,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading organization of computer professionals. Founded in 1946, it is the largest of the 36 societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, commonly referred to as IEEE.