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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Of Gadgets and Their Software
Speaker: Dr. Calin Cascaval, Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley
Abstract: As personal computing is going mobile, applications are also changing to adapt to new life styles and new constraints, and take advantage of new opportunities offered by permanent availability and connectivity. Mobile devices are a significant departure from traditional computing. On the one hand, they are very personal, always on, always connected. They offer so much more than desktops in becoming the hub for our digital lives: more than just phones, they are the gateways for our social interaction through instant messaging, Facebook-ing and Twitter-ing. On the other hand, they are much more constrained in terms of resources. Although progress in their computing and interface capabilities has been staggering, they continue to rely on battery power and are packaged in tight (and appealing) casings that are a nightmare for thermal dissipation.
In this talk I will present some of the challenges facing system programmers for mobile devices and discuss programs in Qualcomm Research that address these challenges.
Bio: Dr. Calin Cascaval is Director of Engineering at the Qualcomm Silicon Valley Research Center, where he is leading projects in the area of parallel software for mobile computing. Previously, he worked at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he worked on systems software, programming models, and compilers for large scale parallel systems, such as Blue Gene and PERCS. He and his team implemented the first UPC compiler to scale to hundreds of thousands of processors. He led research into parallel programming languages and parallel programming abstractions, such as Transactional Memory, Data-centric synchronization, the Asynchronous Partitioned Global Address Space programming model, and Amorphous Data Parallelism. He collaborates extensively with academia and has more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and more than 40 patent disclosures. Dr. Cascaval has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2000).