Wu Feng receives international industry award

Wu Feng, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, is one of 38 recipients worldwide to receive the NVIDIA Professor Partnership Program Award.

NVIDIA Research explores challenging topics on the frontiers of visual, parallel, and mobile computing.

Feng received the award to pursue his research on accelerating the performance of key biological applications on graphics processing units (GPUs). The award consisted of an unrestricted cash gift and equipment donations for research and teaching.

Feng uses GPUs to conduct research on genetic sequence alignment as well as temporal data mining to assist in reverse-engineering the brain. He offers an experimental course on accelerator-based parallel computing.

Feng's past honors include winning the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) first annual Intellectual Property to Market (IP2M) competition in 2008 with his Ph.D. student Song Huang. They developed software called EcoDaemon that will save data centers millions of dollars in energy costs. Beyond the energy savings, the solution improves the reliability and useful life of a computer in the data center by reducing the core temperature, thus providing an opportunity to significantly lower the cost and environmental impact of data centers and many other computing devices.

Feng is also the co-developer of the Green500 List that serves as a ranking of environmentally friendly, low-energy supercomputers and a complement to the TOP500 List. He was listed on HPCwire's Top People to Watch List in 2004.

Feng directs Virginia Tech's Synergy Laboratory. 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.

His research interests encompass usable and accessible high-end computing from the perspective of systems software, middleware, and applications. As such, his research oftentimes bridges multiple disciplines: networking, monitoring and measurement, green computing, and large-scale data mining and bioinformatics, most notably, mpiBLAST. He has over 150 peer-reviewed technical publications, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and BBC News.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical and computer engineering and in music (honors) in 1988 and a Master of Science degree in computer engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1990. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

NVIDIA's Research and university teams are dedicated to building relationships and collaborating with professors at key universities worldwide. Through these partnerships NVIDIA aims to inspire cutting-edge technological innovation through advanced research and to find new ways of enhancing the teaching and learning experience.