Yahya H. Mirza is the founder of Aurora Borealis Software LLC. Since 2002, Yahya has been the organizer of the Language Runtimes (LaR) workshop series held at the OOPSLA and Supercomputing conferences. Through these workshops, Yahya has had the pleasure of interacting with several really creative individuals who have made a deep impact in the computing industry, and have inspired him greatly. Yahya created the LaR workshops to provide a relaxed, non-formal environment to foster technically deep yet innovative discussions. Prior to entering the software industry, Yahya's original background was aircraft design. Yahya's interest in scalable high productivity programming solutions is driven by his passion to utilize distributed supercomputing to enable an interactive theatre to play real-time interactive feature films.

Krste Asanovic is an Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received a B.A. in Electrical and Information Sciences from Cambridge University in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1998. His research interests are computer architecture and VLSI design.

After graduating in Computer Science from the University of Durham, England, Dominic spent time at Microsoft working on compilers before returning to the UK to work for Pilkington Glass on CAD and factory automation. He joined Psygnosis and remained there for seven years during which time Sony acquired the company. Dominic worked on various game titles including the PlayStation launch title WipeOut. Since 1998, he has managed the PlayStation Research & Development group in North America.

George Bosworth was one of the founders of DigiTalk Smalltalk, one of the early object oriented tool vendors and has been working in compilers tools and object oriented languages for well over 30 years. Upon the merging of DigiTalk and ParcPlace, George served as the CTO of the combined organization. In 1997 George went to Microsoft and was one of the many architects involved in the design of the .NET Common Language Runtime. George's contribution was the metadata system, object model, multi-language bindings, and the first JIT compiler for the CLR. Upon retiring from Microsoft, George has been enjoying his freedom.

DAVID A. PATTERSON (University of California at Berkeley) has taught computer architecture since joining the faculty in 1977, and is holder of the E.H. and M.E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science. At Berkeley, he led the design and implementation of RISC I, likely the first VLSI Reduced Instruction Set Computer. This research became the foundation of the SPARC architecture, currently used by Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems, and others. (In 1996 Microprocessor Report and COMDEX named SPARC as one of the most significant microprocessors as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the microprocessor.) He was also a leader of the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) project, which led to reliable storage systems from many companies. These projects led to three distinguished dissertation awards from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He was also involved in the Network of Workstations (NOW) project, which led to cluster technology used by Internet companies such as Inktomi. His current research interests are in building novel microprocessors using Intelligent DRAM (IRAM) for use in portable multimedia devices, and in Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) to provide computers for Internet services that are highly available, easily maintained, and gracefully evolve.

In the past he has been chair of the CS Division in the EECS department at Berkeley, the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Architecture (SIGARCH), and the Computing Research Association (CRA). He is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and the CRA Board. He has consulted for several companies, including Digital (now Compaq), Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, and is on the advisory board of several startup companies. He is also co-author of five books, including two with John Hennessy, President of Stanford University.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, is a Fellow of the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and is also a Fellow of the ACM. He received the inaugural Outstanding Alumnus Award of the UCLA Computer Science Department as part of its 25th Anniversary. In 1995 he received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award. In 1998 he shared the inaugural Test of Time Award with Garth Gibson and Randy Katz, given by the Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) to the most influential paper from the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years earlier. The following year they also shared the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award "for the development of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)." In 2000 he shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal with John Hennessy "for creating a revolution in computer architecture through their exploration, populartization, and commercialization of architectural innovations."

His teaching has been honored by his department in 1998 with the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, by the University of California in 1982 with the Distinguished Teaching Award, by the ACM in 1991 with the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, by IEEE in 1996 with the Undergraduate Teaching Award, and by the IEEE again in 2000 with the James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal "for inspirational teaching through the development of creative curricula and teaching methodology, for important textbooks, and for effective integration of education and research missions."

On the personal side, David married his high-school sweetheart in 1967. She is an award-winning teacher of acting improvisation, and is founder of EAST BAY IMpRoV. (An interview with her appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.) Their first son got a Masters degree in Economics and is now a network administrator near Berkeley. He is founder and director of EAST BAY IMpRoV Players and also teaches at East Bay Improv. (A review of an EBI show appeared in Urban View.) Their second son got a Master's degree in social and decision sciences, and is now a system administrator. His second son lives with his wife and two children near Berkeley.

Away from the computer, David enjoys soccer, mountain biking, weight lifting, surfing, and body surfing.

After graduating in Computer Science from the University of Durham, England, Dominic spent time at Microsoft working on compilers before returning to the UK to work for Pilkington Glass on CAD and factory automation. He joined Psygnosis and remained there for seven years during which time Sony acquired the company. Dominic worked on various game titles including the PlayStation launch title WipeOut. Since 1998, he has managed the PlayStation Research & Development group in North America.

Sanjay J. Patel is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the co-author (with Yale N. Patt of The University of Texas at Austin) of an introductory textbook for computer science and engineering students, titled "Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits and Gates to C and Beyond", which is now available in its second edition from McGraw-Hill.

His research interests include processor microarchitecture, computer architecture, and high performance and reliable computer systems. In particular, his research group, the Advanced Computing Systems Group, investigates high-performance and error-tolerant processor architectures for the 7 to 10 year time horizon. He and his group are developing key instruction optimization technology that will be used in next-generation high-performance microprocessors. Patel has published over 30 articles and papers in the area.

He has done architecture, hardware verification, logic design, and performance modeling at Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Corporation, and HAL Computer Systems, as well as provided consultation for Transmeta, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, HAL, Intel, and AGEIA Technologies. He is currently serving as Chief Architect at AGEIA Technologies.

Patel earned his Bachelor (1990), Master of Science (1992) and Ph.D. (1999) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Jose E. Moreira received B.S. degrees in physics and electrical engineering in 1987 and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1990, all from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Since joining IBM in 1995, he has been involved in several high-performance computing projects, including the Teraflop-scale ASCI Blue-Pacific, ASCI White, and Blue Gene/L, for which he was the System Software Architect. For the past year, Jose has been the Chief Architect of the new Commercial Scale Out initiative at IBM Research to develop superior scalable solutions for commercial computing.

Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Olukotun led the Stanford Hydra project which developed the first chip multiprocessor (multicore chip) with support for thread-level speculation. Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to commercialize chip multiprocessor technology for high-throughput, low power server systems. Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, was acquired by Sun Microsystems. The Niagara based Sun Fire CoolThreads servers have become one of Sun's fastest ramping products ever. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems. Currently, he co-leads the Stanford Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) project. The goal of the TCC project is to make parallel processing accessible to all software developers. Olukotun is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. Olukotun received his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan.

Dr. Gustavson manages the Algorithms and Architectures group in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his B.S. degree in physics, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics, all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined IBM Research in 1963. One of his primary interests has been in developing theory and programming techniques for exploiting the sparseness inherent in large systems of linear equations. Dr. Gustavson has worked in the areas of nonlinear differential equations, linear algebra, symbolic computation, computer-aided design of networks, design and analysis of algorithms, and programming applications. He and his group are currently engaged in activities that are aimed at exploiting the novel features of the IBM family of RISC processors. These include hardware design for divide and square root, new algorithms for POWER2 for the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) and for other math kernels, and parallel algorithms for distributed and shared memory processors. Dr. Gustavson has received an IBM Outstanding Contribution Award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, an IBM Invention Achievement Award, two IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Awards, and a Research Division Technical Group Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Saman Amarasinghe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He leads the Commit compiler group and is the co-leader of the MIT Raw project. His research interests are in discovering novel approaches to improve the performance of modern computer systems without unduly increasing the complexity faced by application developers, compiler writers, or computer architects. Saman is also the founder and currently the Chief Technology Officer of Determina Corporation. Saman received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Cornell University in 1988, and his MSEE and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1990 and 1997, respectively.

Before founding PeakStream, Matt Papakipos spent seven years at NVIDIA, where he was an early member of the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) processor architecture group. He was responsible for personally developing several core architectural components of NVIDIA's GeForce GPU. He served as Architecture Group Manager and Director of Architecture, and ultimately led an 85-person processor architecture design organization.

Matt first worked in the area of High Performance Computing in 1990, programming the MasPar MP-1 and Thinking Machines CM-5 supercomputers as an applications engineer at MasPar and as a student at Brown University. He is the author of more than 20 US patents on processor architecture and implementation. Matt earned a Sc.B. degree in Mathematics/Computer Science from Brown University.

Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda is a Professor of Computer Science at the Ohio State University. His research interests include parallel computer architecture, high performance computing, communication protocols, files systems, network-based computing, and Quality of Service. He has published over 215 papers in major journals and international conferences related to these research areas. Dr. Panda and his research group members have been doing extensive research on high performance MPI and data-centers with modern networking technologies including InfiniBand and iWARP. The MVAPICH/MVAPICH2 (High Performance MPI over InfiniBand and iWARP) open-source software packages, developed by his research group (http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/projects/mpi-iba/), are currently being used by more than 455 organizations world-wide (in 30 countries). This software has enabled several InfiniBand clusters to get into the latest TOP500 ranking. These software packages are also available with the Open Fabrics stack for network vendors (InfiniBand and iWARP), server vendors and Linux distributors. Dr. Panda's research is supported by funding from US National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy, and several industry including Intel, Cisco, SUN, Mellanox, NetApp and Linux Networx.

Vangelis Kokkevis is the manager of the Simulation Technologies group at Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D. His work focuses on physical simulation and character animation techniques for the new generation of game consoles. Most recently, Vangelis' group has been involved with the Playstation3 port and optimization of the AGEIA PhysX SDK. Vangelis his worked extensively in the areas of real-time cloth simulation, rigid, articulated and soft body dynamics, and character animation. He has a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science from Brown University and was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Human Modeling and Simulation where he received a Masters of Science in 1997. Prior to joining SCEA, Vangelis was a partner and lead engineer at Check Six Studios, an independent game development company. Before getting interested in video games technology, Vangelis worked for Alias|Wavefront where he developed a number of modeling, deformation and dynamics tools for Maya.

Alfredo Buttari is a research associate in the Innovative Computing Laboratory of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He obtained a master degree and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. His research interest are in Numerical Linear Algebra and high performance computing on parallel and distributed systems.

Michael A. Heroux worked at Cray Research from 1988 to 1998, the last three years as part of Silicon Graphics. During his first five years he developed mathematical libraries for sparse and dense systems of equations on Cray systems. Following this, he worked in the application division, focusing on solution methods for fluid dynamics, oil and gas and structural applications, both for commercial applications such as FIDAP and FLUENT, and for individual customer applications. During his final three years he managed several groups of scientists focused on new application capabilities in science and engineering, and parallel applications. During these years he was also the applications representative on future architecture teams, including the Cray T3E and SV2 systems.

Presently Dr. Heroux is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, working on new algorithm development, and robust parallel implementation of solver components for problems of interest to Sandia and the broader scientific and engineering community. He leads development of the Trilinos Project, an effort to provide state of the art solution methods in a state of the art software framework. Trilinos is a 2004 R&D 100 award winning product, freely available as Open Source and actively developed by dozens of researchers. In addition to Trilinos, Dr. Heroux works on the development of scalable parallel scientific and engineering applications and maintains his interest in the interaction of scientific/engineering applications and high performance computer architectures. Dr. Heroux is a telecommuter for Sandia, maintaining an office at home in rural central Minnesota and at St. John's University where he is an adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science Department.

John Gustafson is currently the Chief Technical Officer, HPC at ClearSpeed. John joined ClearSpeed in 2005 after leading high-performance computing efforts at Sun Microsystems. He has 32 years experience using and designing compute-intensive systems, including the first matrix algebra accelerator and the first commercial massively-parallel cluster while at Floating Point Systems. His pioneering work on a 1024-processor nCUBE at Sandia National Laboratories created a watershed in parallel computing, for which he received the inaugural Gordon Bell Award. He also has received three R&D 100 Awards for innovative performance models, including the model commonly known as Gustafson's Law or Scaled Speedup. He received his B.S. degree from Caltech and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Iowa State University, all in Applied Mathematics

Professor Laxmikant Kale has been working on various aspects of parallel computing, with a focus on enhancing performance and productivity via adaptive runtime systems, and with the belief that only interdisciplinary research involving multiple CSE and other applications can bring back well-honed abstractions into Computer Science that will have a long-term impact on the state-of-art. His collaborations include the widely used Gordon-Bell award winning (SC'2002) biomolecular simulation program NAMD, and other collaborations on computational cosmology, quantum chemistry, rocket simulation, space-time meshes, and other unstructured mesh applications. He takes pride in his group's success in distributing and supporting software embodying his research ideas, including Charm++, Adaptive MPI and the ParFUM framework.

L. V. Kale received the B.Tech degree in Electronics Engineering from Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, India in 1977, and a M.E. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, in 1979. He received a Ph.D. in computer science in from State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1985. He worked as a scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research from 1979 to 1981. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in 1985, where he is currently employed as a Professor.

Richard Lethin is President of Reservoir Labs. Reservoir Labs provides leading-edge consulting and contract R&D to the computer industry, government, and business end-users, employing state of the art compiler and verification technologies, and also bring proprietary tools developed on a wide variety of architectures. Reservoir Labs uses its technologies and skills to help clients achieve substantial improvements in the capabilities, performance, power savings, cost, and reliability of their computer systems and computer products.

Dr. Kevin G. Bowcutt is a Boeing Senior Technical Fellow and Chief Scientist of Hypersonics for The Boeing Company, with 24 years of experience. He also serves as the Enterprise Chairman for the Boeing Technical Fellowship. Dr. Bowcutt holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, and is a world-renowned expert in hypersonic aerodynamics, propulsion integration, and vehicle design and optimization. Dr. Bowcutt currently leads several hypersonic vehicle design/analysis efforts and the development of a sophisticated hypersonic vehicle multidisciplinary design analysis/optimization (MDA/O) system. He is also teaching the capstone undergraduate airplane design course for the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at Princeton University for the 2007 spring term, while at the same time working full-time for Boeing. The MDA/O system development work is advancing the state of the art of this revolutionary new approach to system design, which is extremely valuable not only to hypersonic vehicles but to other classes of aerospace vehicle and to non-aerospace products as well. He also routinely leads technical non-advocate reviews and technical advisory boards across the Boeing Company, helps solve key technical problems, develops valuable innovations, and serves as a technical advisor to, and a collaborator with NASA and several universities on their research programs.

Dr. Evan Smyth, the principal software engineer for DreamWorks Animation. At DreamWorks Animation, Smyth is actively involved in developing a supercomputing strategy as well as exploring various co-processing technologies. Since joining the company in 2002, he has worked on Shark Tale, Madagascar and Over the Hedge. Prior to coming to DreamWorks, Smyth was the software architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he worked on many films including: Stuart Little, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Spider-Man, I Spy and Hollow Man. Before transitioning to the film industry, he worked at ElectricImage, Alias|Wavefront, ComputerVision and BMW. Smyth holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Master's Degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and both a B.Sc. and a B.Arch. from the University of Notre Dame.

Originally from Wales in the UK, Gareth Morgan is presently responsible for business development at Softimage, bringing over 15 years of games industry and post-production experience to the company, and has played a leading role in designing Softimage products and technologies over the last decade. Gareth also works closely with business development groups across SoftimageÕs parent organization, Avid Technology, Inc. One of the inventors of the track-based animation mixer, GarethÕs previous responsibilities have included both interaction design and product marketing at Softimage, contributing to a wide variety customer projects particularly related to his first passion, videogames. Notable projects include SEGA's Virtua Fighter series - the first game featuring 3D characters, ActivisionÕs Battlezone, and Valve's Half-Life 2. Prior to Softimage, Gareth worked as a designer and animator in the UK post-production & games industries. Today, he is based at the Softimage head-office in MontrŽal, QuŽbec. Outside the office, his time is mostly absorbed in the care and operation of a small forest farm, where there is neither television, nor internet. There are, however, one or two videogame systems.

Habib Zargarpour stumbled into 3D graphics in 1990 while designing for a film and considers computer graphics to be "the perfect mix" of the technical and artistic worlds. He received his B.A.S.C. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and went on to graduate with distinction in Industrial Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1992. After working as a graphic artist and fine arts illustrator, Habib joined Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as a technical director on The Mask. He went on to earn many credits as an Associate Visual Effects Supervisor while at ILM, most recently for The Perfect Storm. Habib is currently a Senior Art Director at EA and has most recently worked on EA's Need for Speed Most Wanted. Habib still likes to paint with real brushes once in a while to maintain his sanity.

Habib's film credits include:

• 2002: MelBotWars, virtual fighting robots uses dynamic rigid body simulation in Maya. It was designed and developed by Habib Zargarpour for Industrial Light & Magic.
• 2000: The Perfect Storm - Associate Visual Effects Supervisor, Recipient of the British Academy Award - Best Achievement in Visual Effects, Nominee for Academy Award - Best Achievement in Visual Effects
• 1999: Star Wars: Episode I "The Phantom Menace" - Computer Graphics Supervisor
• 1997: Spawn - Associate Visual Effects Supervisor
• 1996: Star Trek -First Contact - Computer Graphics Supervisor
• 1996: Twister - Digital Tornado Designer/Computer Graphics Supervisor, Recipient of the British Academy Award - Best Achievement in Visual Effects, Nominee for Academy Award - Best Achievement in Visual Effects
• 1995: Jumanji - Computer Graphics Sequence Supervisor
• 1994: Star Trek: Generations - Senior Technical Director
• 1993: The Mask - Technical Director