Alexandru NicolauView profile
Professor
Alexandru Nicolau is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (USA), where he has worked since 1992. He previously held positions as Associate Professor (1988–1992) and Assistant Professor (1984–1988) at UC Irvine and Cornell University, respectively. Education : B.A., Brandeis University (1980) MS (1981), Ph.D. (1984), Yale University Research Interests : A leading expert in parallelizing compilers , high-performance computing , and software-hardware co-design , Nicolau pioneered foundational techniques like Percolation Scheduling and Optimal Loop Parallelization . His work enables efficient exploitation of instruction-level parallelism in general-purpose programs, with applications in embedded systems , matrix algorithms , and GPU-based neural networks . He has also contributed to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and lightweight synchronization protocols . Scientific Awards : IEEE Fellow (2014) ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential Paper (PLDI 20 years) EDAA/IEEE/ACM DATE Most Influential Paper (10 years) ACM ICS Most Influential Paper (25 years) 4 Best Paper awards (VLSI design 2003, ISHPC 2005, CASES 2008, IJCNN 2009) Advising & Grants : He has mentored notable scholars now at Stanford, McGill, and Google, and secured over $20M in funding from NSF , DARPA , and industry leaders like IBM and Intel . His professional service includes chairing ACM ICS’09 and PPOPP’13, and serving on steering committees for LCPC and ICS. Labs & Collaborations : His techniques have been adopted by IBM Watson, Siemens Munich, Fujitsu Labs Japan, and the open-source GCC compiler.







