Torrellas recognized with several honors

One Coordinated Science Laboratory and Computer Science professor has been honored with several noteworthy awards. 

Josep Torrellas recently received the Tau Beta Pi Daniel C. Drucker award, which recognizes faculty noticed at the national and international level for their dedication to academic excellence and outstanding contributions to their fields. 

Torrellas said it is “very humbling” to be named the 2024 recipient of this prestigious award. “You will look at all the other ones who have received it in the past; [they are] the most illustrious members of our department, of our college.” He said during his more than 30 years at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he has seen many “extremely accomplished” faculty win this award. “I’m pretty happy to be part of them.” 

 And Torrellas’ recognition does not stop there. 

He co-authored a paper, “Micro-Armed Bandit,” that was included as a 2024 IEEE Micro Top Picks from Computer Architectures Conferences. The paper —co-authored by graduate student Gerasimos Gerogiannis --  uses a reuseable online reinforcement learning agent that is lightweight. 

 “For our community-the community of computer architecture, computer design- [this award] is a big deal because every year they take only 12 papers,” said Torrellas. “It’s also very, very satisfying to see that the work of the students...is recognized, and it’s high quality.” 

Three other papers co-authored by Torrellas were given honorable mentions by IEEE Micro Top Picks. Those papers were “μManycore: A Cloud-Native CPU for Tail at Scale;” “Untangle: A Principled Framework to Design Low-Leakage, High-Performance Dynamic Partitioning Schemes;” and “SPADE: A Flexible and Scalable Accelerator for SpMM and SDDMM.” 

Earlier this month, Torrellas gave a keynote address at the IPASS conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is a premier conference on performance analysis of systems. Torrellas presented the JUMP2.0 ACE Center’s work on imagining the high performance, energy efficient distributed computing systems of the future. This was the first keynote address of the conference. 

Torrellas’ research interests range from computer architecture to low-power design and more. His prowess in these fields recently led him to become the director of the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, a large, multi-university center that aims to devise novel technologies for scalable distributed computing that will improve the performance and the energy efficiency of diverse applications. There are 100 PhD students involved in ACE from around the country. 

 “We try to work with companies to understand and help them see what kind of new technologies in distributed computing will be helpful to save more energy. And that includes not just computing engines, but also storage, communication, and security mechanisms,” said Torrellas.  

While Torrellas appreciated these recognitions, he is more excited about how his work is shaping the world. “The most important thing is all the students that I have been able to mentor,” he said. He is also proud of the work he has put in towards helping companies advance computer design. “Hopefully computers are faster, easier to use, consume less energy and have new capabilities thanks to some of the designs that we have proposed.”