"Wen-mei Hwu: CTO of MulticoreWare, and is a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializing in compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He currently holds the Walter J. (""Jerry"") Sanders III-Advanced Micro Devices Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He is a PI for the petascale Blue Waters system, is co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and PI for the world's first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Dr. Hwu leads the IMPACT Research Group and is director of the OpenIMPACT project - which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. He previously edited GPU Computing Gems, a similar work focusing on NVIDIA CUDA."
It wasn't until recently that parallel [GPU] computing made people realize that there are whole areas in computing science that we can tackle. ... When you can do something 10 or 100 times faster, something magical happens and you can do something completely different. -Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA