Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering
Kavčić -Moura Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director, Engineering Research Accelerator
Franz Franchetti is the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in Technical Mathematics and his 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 which won the Gordon Bell Prize (Peak Performance Award) and in 2010 he was member of the team which won the HPC Challenge Class II Award (most productive system). In 2013 he was awarded the College of Engineering Dean’s Early Career Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon.
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, 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.
Franchetti is the associate dean for research for the College of Engineering, as well as the director of the Engineering Research Accelerator at Carnegie Mellon. 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.
Franchetti is immediate 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.
Franchetti 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.
2003 Ph.D., Vienna University of Technology
2000 MS, Vienna University of Technology
1994 HTL Matura in Mechanical Engineering and Automation
Congratulations to the newly-appointed Associate Dean for Research for the College of Engineering, ECE’s Franz Franchetti. His history in serving as part of and leading research teams around the college led to his nomination and selection.
U.S. Department of Energy
A proposal by ECE’s Franz Franchetti, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL), is one of five across the country that was selected for funding.
CMU College of Engineering
ECE faculty Franz Franchetti, Gianluca Piazza, Shawn Blanton, Maysam Chamanzar, and Vyas Sekar were awarded professorship titles in April and May 2021.
CMU
ECE’s Franz Franchetti has been appointed as an honorary consul by Alexander Van der Bellen, president of Austria.
Tech Xplore
ECE’s Franz Franchetti and Vít Růžička recently developed a new model that enables fast and accurate object detection in high-resolution 4K and 8K video footage using GPUs.
Technology Review
Despite having been tweaked to adapt, current graphic chips soak up a lot of energy when working in parallel for deep-learning systems. CMU has had to ask its researchers to throttle back their chip use due to the strain they placed on the university’s power system. CyLab’s Franz Franchetti says that CMU is looking for an alternative power source.
