Franz Franchetti is the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in Technical Mathematics and the Dr. techn. (Ph.D.) degree in Computational Mathematics from the Vienna University of Technology in 2000 and 2003, respectively. In 2006 he was member of the team winning the Gordon Bell Prize (Peak Performance Award) and in 2010 he was member of the team winning the HPC Challenge Class II Award (most productive system). In 2013 he was awarded the CIT Dean’s Early Career Fellowship by the College of Engineering of Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Franchetti’s research focuses on automatic performance tuning and program generation for emerging parallel platforms and algorithm/hardware co-synthesis. He targets multicore CPUs, clusters and high-performance systems (HPC), graphics processors (GPUs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), FPGA-acceleration for CPUs, and logic-in-memory and 3DIC chip design.  Within the Spiral effort, his research goal is to enable automatic generation of highly optimized software libraries for important kernel functionality. In other collaborative research threads, Dr. Franchetti is investigating the applicability of domain-specific transformations within standard compilers and the application of HPC in smart grids and material sciences. He has led four DARPA projects in the BRASS, HACMS, PERFECT, and PAPPA programs and is Co-PI in the DOE ExaScale Project and XStack program as well as DARPA DPRIVE. Recent interests include leveraging the SPIRAL system for quantum computing.

Dr. Franchetti is the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Engineering (Carnegie Institute of Technology) as well as the Director of the Engineering Research Accelerator (CIT) at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also CTO and Co-Founder of Spiral Gen, Inc., a Pittsburgh area startup that commercializes the Spiral technology. Previously, he has been Thrust Leader of the Security Thrust in Carnegie Mellon’s SRC Smart Grid Research Center and Faculty Senator for the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon.

Professor Franchetti is Past President of the Austrian Scientists and Scholars in North America (ASciNA), and currently leads the ASciNA Western Pennsylvania chapter. Please contact him if you are an Austrian academic in the Greater Pittsburgh area. He is the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Austria for Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania, USA.

Franz has been playing the electric guitar on-stage in various rock bands since 1993. Watch him perform live or visit Wr. Neustadt’s newcomer festival SCHMU, where he performed and served as stage engineer.