Wu Feng, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, has been named to “HPCWire” magazine’s “People to Watch List” for 2011. It is the second such honor for Feng, who was named to the same list in 2004.

The list comprises individuals who are seen as influential in the high-performance computing community, according to magazine editors. Honorees are selected from a pool of potential candidates in academia, government, industrial end-user and vendor communities, and are believed to be “thought leaders.”

In the upcoming article, “HPCWire” calls Feng “an idea factory.” He is honored for his work in the field of efficient supercomputing and bioinformatics, and spurring younger computer scientists to use energy efficiency in computer design.

The honor follows Feng’s being recognized as a 2010 Distinguished Member by the Association for Computing Machinery just this past month. He was honored for this award with fellow computer science faculty member Doug Bowman.

Feng is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing and the Center for High-End Computing Systems at Virginia Tech. He also directs the Synergy Laboratory, which conducts basic and applied research in high-performance computing at the synergistic intersection of systems software, middleware, tools and applications software. He also holds an adjunct professorship appointment with the School of Medicine at Wake Forest University.

Feng also has received wide attention from computer/tech industry media outlets on his work with The Green500 List, which he co-founded and co-developed. The Green500 ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world based on energy efficiency and serves as a complement to the TOP500 List. 

He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering and in music with honors in 1988 and a master’s degree in computer engineering from Penn State University in 1990.  He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He also is a senior member of the IEEE. Previous professional stints include The Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Orion Multisystems, Vosaic, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NASA Ames Research Center, and most recently, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Share this story