Dr. Xian-He Sun Elected IEEE Fellow
The IEEE has elected Dr. Xian-He Sun, chair of the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Tech, to its class of 2011 Fellows "for contributions to memory-bounded performance metrics and scalable parallel computing," as Illinois Tech announced on January 5, 2012 (opens in a new tab). Fellow is the IEEE's highest grade of membership, held by approximately 0.1 percent of its voting members.
The citation
The citation refers to the memory-bounded speedup model, known as Sun-Ni's Law, which Dr. Sun and Lionel Ni introduced in 1990. Amdahl's Law fixes the problem size and Gustafson's Law fixes the execution time; the memory-bounded model instead scales the problem with the memory available as processors are added, so that memory capacity enters the analysis of parallel scalability. Dr. Sun's later work on concurrent memory access, including the C-AMAT model published in IEEE Computer in 2014, continued this line of research in the SCS Lab, the predecessor of the Gnosis Research Center.