David Patterson, former ACM President and Director of University of California, Berkeley's Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) and the UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab), will give a lecture on "The Parallel Revolution Has Started: Are You Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?" at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on April 8. Patterson will explain:

• Why the La-Z-Boy era of programming is over
• The implications to the IT industry if the parallel revolution should fail
• The opportunities and pitfalls of this revolution
• What Berkeley is doing to try to be near the forefront of this revolution

If time permits, the talk will also explain a new intuitive visual performance model called "Roofline," which will be featured in the April 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM.

A live video stream will be activated at the time of the event. For more information, please visit the Parallel@Illinois Distinguished Lecture Series web site .