Keynote

Keynote

Tarek El-Ghazawi
The George Washington University, Washington DC

Reconfigurable Computing with Nanophotonics

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Abstract

With the end of the Moore’s law and Dennard Scaling, new post-Moore’s law processing paradigms are sought.  Nanophotonic devices are characterized by being ultralow power.    Harnessing the new developments in material science, many of such devices were created and shown to be capable of performing analog and digital computations that can address a range of applications.  Such nanophotonic devices are intrinsically reconfigurable thereby offering a very powerful computational alternative which combines low power, reduced sizes, speed and reconfigurability. They also offer a great deal of parallelism through wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).   While substantial progress has been made and there are notable successes, many technological challenges remain.  In this talk we will present a range of novel photonic analog and digital reconfigurable computer architectures to solve important problems with applications, including but not limited, to partial differential equations, which form the basis for many scientific and engineering computations, and deep neural networks for machine learning.   We also characterize some of the successes and the remaining research challenges.

Bio

Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University.  He was a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC).  His interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable computing, nanophontonic based computing. He is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC parallel programming language.  At present he is leading and co-leading efforts for Post-Moore’s Law processors including analog, nanophotonic and neuromorphic computing.   El-Ghazawi has published close to 300 refereed research publications.  His research has been funded government organizations. Dr. El-Ghazawi has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions Parallel and Distributed Computing and the IEEE Transaction on Computers. He has chaired and co-chaired many international conferences.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and selected as an IBM CAS Research Faculty Fellow. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technical Innovation, The IEEE Outstanding Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing, and the GW SEAS Distinguished Researcher Award. He was also selected an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitors Program Speaker.