Sandhya Dwarkadas, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been appointed the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering. The Board of Trustees approved the appointment in January.
Her research lies at the interface of hardware and software with a particular focus on concurrency. She has more than a 100 refereed publications that span various areas within computer architecture and systems, and she is coinventor on 11 granted United States patents, some of which are currently licensed. She is a board member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, and is currently on the editorial board of CACM Research Highlights and IEEE Micro.
Dwarkadas has made fundamental contributions to the design and implementation of shared memory both in hardware and software. She was one of the principal designers of the influential TreadMarks system, a pioneering attempt to efficiently emulate shared memory across a cluster of workstations. TreadMarks eventually became the basis of Intel’s Cluster OpenMP.
She has also made fundamental contributions to hardware and software energy- and resource-aware configurability. Recognizing that heat dissipation and wire-delay-constrained clock rates were slowing the pace at which increasing transistor counts could be leveraged, she developed several designs that overcome these limitations: runtime configurable on-chip regular microprocessor structures; multiple clock domain processors; and dynamically tunable clustered multithreaded architectures. Her contributions have led to both high impact publications and licensed patents. She continues to develop techniques to automate hardware reconfiguration from software using minimally invasive techniques.
Dwarkadas received her bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India, and her MS and PhD degrees from Rice University. She joined the faculty at Rochester in 1996.