This talk will be more CS- and ECE-oriented and will have a combination of breadth (25-year perspective) and depth (automated runtime system for energy efficiency).
In the early 2000s, supercomputing focused on performance, in terms of speed, as evidenced by the annual Gordon Bell Awards at Supercomputing (SC). Thus, when Green Destiny debuted in April 2002 as the world's most energy-efficient (i.e., greenest) supercomputer in the world, it was resoundingly ridiculed. However, the audacity of Green Destiny, a 240-node supercomputer in five square feet and consuming 3.2 kilowatts of power (or the equivalent of two hairdryers), created such a fervor as disruptive technology that it led to international media coverage that resulted in a grassroots movement towards building greener supercomputers via hardware, software, algorithms, applications, or some combination thereof. This talk chronicles the confessions of an accidental greenie from how Green Destiny came about, how it has evolved, and what the future holds.
Wu Feng is a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (VT), where he directs the Synergy Lab and serves as a VT site co-director for the National Science Foundation Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC). In addition, he holds appointments in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Health Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering and Science.
Dr. Feng has published 300+ peer-reviewed technical publications in high-performance networking and computing, high-speed systems monitoring and measurement, low-power and power-aware computing, computer science pedagogy for K-12, and bioinformatics, including the publication of "The Green Computing Book: Tackling Energy Efficiency at Large Scale" and a worldwide Microsoft commercial about his research on biocomputing in the cloud.
Dr. Feng holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a M.S. in Computer Engineering, and B.S. degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Music from Penn State University. In addition to being a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM and Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society, Dr. Feng has been named to HPCwire's Top People to Watch twice, once in 2004 and again in 2011.