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The Association for Computing Machinery, founded in 1947 as the world's first professional society in computing, has named Duncan Buell, professor and chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as co-editor in chief of the new publication Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems. Buell will serve as co-rditor with Wayne Luk of Imperial College London.
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| Duncan Buell |
The new journal will be the first peer-reviewed archival publication dedicated to reconfigurable computing, a field with which Buell has been involved for more than 20 years. The distinguishing feature of reconfigurable computing is that applications designers need not be confined to the static processor and computer architectures of conventional computers. Instead, a more generic hardware platform is provided with the user being able flexibly to configure the silicon resources to implement a hardware architecture custom-designed for the application at hand. Unlike true special purpose hardware, however, the generic platform can be reprogrammed in a different configuration with a different design. In some applications, this reconfiguration takes place hundreds or even thousands of times during the course of an application.
The promise offered by reconfigurable computing is a speedup of factors of 50 to 100 over conventional processing for suitable applications. Such improvements have been obtained on a number of applications. One of the core research problems that makes this performance harder to achieve is that real success often requires "hardware design" instead of "applications programming." A focus of Buell's research over the last several years has been to improve the environment in which programming these machines takes place without sacrificing the performance gains.
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