The IMPACT Research Group, under the direction of Professor Wen-mei W. Hwu, is well known for development of the IMPACT Compiler, which is now widely used in industry and academic research. Our recent work addresses application frameworks, programming models, and tool flows for many-core processors. Our students work in a rich hands-on environment that emphasizes real-world computing issues for cutting-edge applications such as:

• The University of Illinois Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, for which Wen-mei Hwu leads the Acceleration Project. IACAT brings together applications from across the university campus, from biology to social informatics.
• Nationwide, multi-university collaborations, such as the DARPA-SIA Gigascale Systems Research Center, for which Wen-mei Hwu leads the Concurrent Theme. The IMPACT group works with teams from MIT, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, and other top universities to advance computational performance through increases in concurrency and efficiency, rather than raw speed.
• The NSF Petascale computer for science and engineering applications, for which Wen-mei Hwu leads the hardware and application accelerator teams. Dubbed Blue Waters the world's most powerful supercomputer will make arithmetic calculations of >1,000 trillion operations per second. UIUC teams, including NCSA and the IMPACT group, are partnering with IBM to help investigators solve some of the world's most challenging science and engineering research problems.
• World-class education programs, including a unique new course on Programming Massively Parallel Processors, co-taught by Wen-mei Hwu and David Kirk, Chief Scientist of NVIDIA. This course prepares students for the next-generation challenges and opportunities of massive parallelism.
• The Gelato Federation, a worldwide consortium for high-performance computing, for which Wen-mei Hwu is principal investigator. Founded by HP, Gelato members now include 71 universities and national laboratories around the world and industry sponsors such as Intel, BP, and SGI.