Power.org in Barcelona
Power.org in Barcelona: Building a Power-ful new community
Speaker Biographies
Evolving chip design tools and high-performance computing needs
Dr. Rahul Razdan, Cadence
Dr. Rahul Razdan, a corporate vice president at Cadence, is currently the managing director for the IBM account. Prior to this role, he was the general manager for the software functional verification products at cadence for six years. Dr. Razdan joined Cadence from Digital Equipment Corporation, where he held a number of positions in the CAE and Design team in the Alpha Microprocessor Group. He has over 20 patents and 20 referred publications. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University, and his PhD from Harvard University.
Solving networked storage challenges
Gerard Boudon, AMCC
Gerard Boudon received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from ESIEE (Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieur en Electronique and Electrotechnique) in Paris in 1973. From 1974 to 2004, he worked at the IBM Microelectronics Component development laboratory in Corbeil-Essonnes, France, as a chip designer, architect of embedded controllers, and a program and marketing manager. Now with AMCC, he is currently expert in PowerPC 4XX embedded controllers application support. He has 14 patents and large number of publications.
Power Architecture in THALES embedded and avionics application
Robert Negre, Thales
Robert Negre completed his graduate studies at the Ecole Superieure d'Electricite "Supelec", Paris, France, 1980. He worked first as a Project Manager with CSEE, a French company, from 1980 to 1986, involved in image processing and optronics projects. He joined then CETIA as Computer Service Manager and today is the Vice President of Product Engineering of Thales Computers at Toulon, France.
Robert's expertise is mainly based on Single Board Computer architecture, VMEbus, PowerPC, and COTS for Defense and Aerospace, Real-time, and Signal Processing.
Discovering the history of the universe using radio telescopes and Blue Gene
Kjeld v.d. Schaaf, Astron
Kjeld v.d. Schaaf started his career in nuclear physics. His research was on detailled experiments of proton-proton interaction at intermediate energies. A large part of this research consisted of Monte-Carlo simulations, data acquisition, data processing, and analysis software. In 1998, he joined Astron (Netherlands foundation for astronomy) and worked on the control software for the Westerbork radio telescope and the THEA demonstrator system. He was system engineer during the first years of the LOFAR project and later became responsible for the LOFAR software development and the central processing facility. Kjeld v.d. Schaaf is head of the software engineering department at Astron
HPC: Coupling PowerPCs with communication devices
David Slogsnat, University of Mannheim
David Slogsnat is a member of the Computer Architecture Group at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He studied computer engineering at the University of Mannheim and graduated in 2002. As a research associate and PhD student, his current research focuses on parallel computer architecture and high-performance cluster interconnects.
Linux for Power: How Linux will evolve to optimize applications on Power
Juergen Geck, Novell/SUSE
Juergen Geck, born 1967, joined SUSE in 1997, and served since early 2000 as Vice President Technology Partners. He built strong alliances with partners AMD, Fujitsu-Siemens-Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and SAP. Geck built a framework for SUSE to cooperate with all major hardware vendors and CPU manufacturers.
In 2002, he introduced SUSE's Technology Partner Program to provide a scalable offering for all SUSE partners. Geck designed SUSE's flagship product, SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server and its maintenance model, enabling the first enterprise Linux offering in the market. He holds a masters degree in production engineering from the University of Erlangen, Germany.
In March 2003, Juergen Geck was appointed CTO of SUSE LINUX AG. Since February 2004, he has been responsible for aligning and communicating the technology strategy for SUSE LINUX at Novell.
Creating a power super cluster: One of the top supercomputers in the world
Jesus Labarta, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Jesus Labarta has been a full professor on Computer Architecture UPC since 1990. Since 1981, he has been lecturing on computer architecture, operating systems, computer networks, and performance evaluation. His research interest has been centered on parallel computing, covering areas from multiprocessor architecture, memory hierarchy, parallelizing compilers, operating systems, parallelization of numerical kernels, metacomputing tools, and performance analysis and prediction tools. The research work has resulted in approximately 60 papers.
He led the technical work of UPC in 15 industrial R+D projects. Significant performance improvements were achieved in commercial codes owned by partners with whom he has cooperated. From 1195 to 2005, he was director of CEPBA, where he has been highly motivated by the promotion of parallel computing into industrial practice, and especially within SMEs. In this line, he has been responsible for three technology transfer cluster projects, where his team managed 28 subprojects relating to performance analysis tools and OpenMP. From 2000 to 2004, he carried out and promoted productive research cooperation with IBM as part of the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute. He is now involved in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, doing leading research on high-performance computing.
PowerPC64 Linux kernel maintainer
Anton Blanchard, IBM
Anton Blanchard has had a long association with Linux, having started tinkering with it as a hobby in 1994 before making his first contribution to the kernel in 1996. From these beginnings, he has become a well-respected member of the Linux kernel development community and is widely considered to be one of the core Linux kernel developers. He co-maintained the port of Linux to the SPARC microprocessor before moving his attentions to POWER, where they remain to this day. His work on LinuxPPC over the last four years has, along with the efforts of the broader Open Source community, been instrumental in the tremendous improvements in performance and scalability of the kernel on large SMP systems. Today, Anton is one of the two Linux kernel community maintainers of the PowerPC64-specific parts of the Linux kernel.
Anton is a Senior Kernel Hacker with IBM's "OzLabs" group in Canberra, Australia. OzLabs are part of IBM's worldwide Linux Technology Centre and, among other things, have responsibility within IBM for all base Linux kernel development for the PowerPC architecture.
PowerPC soft cores allow for flexible chip design: Custom-tailor PowerPC for your application using tools that are available worldwide
Mike O'Brien, Synopsys
Mike O'Brien, Global Account Director, is responsible for all aspects of the Synopsys and IBM relationship, including technical and business collaborations, as well as the sales and consulting teams that support IBM. Under Mike's leadership, Synopsys has executed a number of engagements with IBM that enable the design in and adoption of PowerPC to a broader community. Mike has more than 20 years of experience leading teams and building alliances in electronics design, technical software, and information processing technology for such companies as Synopsys, Cadence(including Tality), Pure Software (subsequently acquired by Rational and IBM), and Wang Labs. Mike received a B.A. from Harvard University.
Connecting intelligent vehicles with intelligent networks: How researchers can transform Europe's road traffic systems
Dieter Staiger, IBM
Dieter Staiger initially joined IBM Sindelfingen in test system engineering in 1972, designing high-performance ASICs (GaAs technology) and architecting complex test systems. Turning over to the embedded world in the 1990, he developed systems covering a wide solution span, ranging from SmartCard initialization and high-efficient processing systems to dedicated PDAs. At the end of the 1990s, Dieter joined the pervasive computing area, responsible for automotive architecture, covering hardware and software and focusing on consolidating complex vehicle IT systems. In 1999, he became an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), and in 2005 he joined Open-Systems Design & Development (OSDD), taking hardware design global lead for PowerPC Blades and related products. Dieter holds key patents in the field of autonomic computing and distributed processing.
Unleashing the power: A programming example of large FFTs on Cell
Alex Chow, IBM
Alex Chunghen Chow is a senior programmer and a software development manager in IBM's Cell Processor Design Center (Austin, Texas). He leads a team developing workload, libraries, demos, and samples for the Cell processor system bring-up. He received a B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronic engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. He also received a PhD from the University of Arizona in electrical and computer engineering. His fields of work include discrete event simulation, distributed and parallel simulation, object-oriented programming, and framework.