Torrellas Elected to CRA Board of Directors

CS Professor and ECE affiliate Josep Torrellas was recently elected to the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors. Founded in 1972, the CRA brings together industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing.

As a board member, Torrellas and his colleagues, including fellow CS Professor Sarita Adve, will address some of the major issues affecting the computing research community and will help shape the community’s actions.

“I look forward to helping broaden the scope of computing research, amplify its impact on society, nurture computing researchers, and make the case for computing research in the federal government,” said Torrellas, who has been active in CRA- related organizations and events. He recently completed a three-year stint as Council Member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), which focuses on catalyzing computing research initiatives at the national level.As a board member, Torrellas and his colleagues, including fellow CS Professor Sarita Adve, will address some of the major issues affecting the computing research community and will help shape the community’s actions.

A pioneer in shared-memory multiprocessor architectures, Torrellas has made important research contributions to cache hierarchies, coherence protocols, synchronization, consistency models, and thread-level speculation. These contributions make it easier to program multiprocessor machines while enhancing their performance.

In addition, Torrellas’ work has addressed energy efficiency issues in multiprocessor architectures. He has devised techniques to handle process variation and wear-out, and to improve the energy efficiency of multicores. Today, Torrellas is conducting research to make the multicores in smart phones and tablets more programmable, energy efficient, and secure.

Torrellas is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. In 2015, he received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. He has graduated 36 doctoral students, many of whom are now leaders in academia and industry.

He is the director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and former director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC) whose aim was to promote parallel programming.