Dr. Viktor K. Prasanna, Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer
Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, at the University of
Southern California, will give a lecture entitled: "Reconfigurable
Computing: Opportunities and Challenges". The lecture is part of the College
of Engineering's distinguished Ohanian Lecture Series, and is sponsored by
the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Details of the lecture
are attached. 
All are invited to attend. 
 
DATE:  Wednesday, November 1, 2006
TIME:  4:00PM - 5:00PM
LOCATION: 310 Larsen Hall
TITLE:  Reconfigurable Computing: Opportunities and Challenges
 
Speaker
Dr. Viktor k. prasanna (ceng.usc.edu/~prasanna)
Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering Division &
Professor of Computer Science
University of Southern California
 
SUMMARY
Reconfigurable devices and systems have evolved over the past 
decade.
Recently, several state of the art high end platforms have 
incorporated
FPGAs for application acceleration. This talk explores algorithmic
optimizations for accelerating a wide variety of applications on such
systems. We discuss early theoretical underpinnings and illustrate 
the
performance improvements for embedded as well as scientific 
computing on
such platforms. We develop algorithmic optimizations for such 
systems and
demonstrate the suitability of FPGAs for floating point intensive
computations. We discuss the design of a BLAS library for such 
systems.
The performance of FPGAs is also compared against those of state-
of-the-art
embedded processors, general purpose processors, and DSPs for 
floating point
intensive applications. We conclude by highlighting the challenges in
further exploiting this technology for application acceleration
 
BIOGRAPHY OF "Viktor K. prasanna"
Viktor K. Prasanna (V. K. Prasanna Kumar) 
(ceng.usc.edu/~prasanna) is
Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering as well as in 
the
Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern 
California, Los
Angeles. He is also an associate member of the Center for Applied
Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) at USC. He served as the Division 
Director for
the Computer Engineering Division during 1994-98. His research 
interests
include parallel and distributed systems including networked sensor 
systems
 
Dr. Prasanna has published extensively and consulted for industries 
in the
above areas. He has served on the organizing committees of 
several
international meetings in VLSI computations, parallel computation, 
and high
performance computing. He is the Steering Co-chair of the 
International
Parallel and Distributed  Processing Symposium [merged IEEE 
International
Parallel Processing Symposium(IPPS) and the Symposium on 
Parallel and
Distributed Processing(SPDP)] and is the Steering Chair of the 
International
Conference on High Performance Computing(HiPC). He has served 
on the
editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing,
Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, and 
IEEE
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is the Editor-
in-Chief
of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the founding Chair 
of the IEEE
Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He 
is a Fellow
of the IEEE.