Title: What to do with all this hardware? Could the PRAM-On-Chip architecture lead to upgrading the WINTEL performance-to-productivity platform? Uzi Vishkin University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The upcoming so-called ``on-chip Billion transistor'' era raises the question: What to do with all the on-chip hardware once the returns on adding more on-chip memory start to diminish? Parallel computing has been a strategic area of growth for computer science and engineering since the 1940s. So far, parallel computing affected main stream computer science only in a limited way. The key problem with parallel computers has been their programmability. The parallel algorithms research community has developed a theory of parallel algorithms, for a very simple parallel computation model - the Parallel Random-Access Model (PRAM). That theory appears to be second in magnitude only to serial algorithmics. However, the evolution of parallel computers never reached a situation where the PRAM offered effective abstraction for them. So, this elegant algorithmic theory remained in the ivory towers of theorists. Not only that it has not been matched with a real computer system, there has hardly been an experimental study of what works better, more refined performance measurements, and a broad study of applications. For example, the general question ``how good parallel algorithms can really be'' has remained generally open. Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) is a new fine-grained computation framework which tries to address the hardware opportunity using the parallel algorithmic knowledge base. XMT aims at faster single-task completion time by way of executing in parallel many instruction all within a single chip (``PRAM-On-Chip''). Building on some key ideas of parallel computing, XMT covers the spectrum from algorithms through architecture to implementation; the main implementation related innovation in XMT was through the incorporation of low-overhead hardware mechanisms (for more effective fine-grained parallelism). The two immediate key research questions are ``how to build?'' an XMT computer and ``who cares?''; that is, what will be the key applications? However, one should not lose sight of the bigger picture. Many summarize the economic success of informations technology, as that of translating performance to productivity. Can we use the productivity point of view to motivate an upgrade of the standard platform to one which is based on PRAM-On-Chip? URL: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~vishkin/XMT BIO --- Uzi Vishkin is a permanent member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 1988. He was Professor of Computer Science at the Technion in Israel in 2000-2001. Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel, where he was Chair of the Computer Science Department in 1987-8 and Professor since 1988. He received the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics from the Hebrew University 1974 and 1975, respectively, and the D.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Technion in 1981. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM T.J. Watson Research, and was with the Courant Institute, New York University, from 1982 till 1988. Motivated, since 1979, by the grand, but so far mostly elusive, challenge of reducing the completion time of a single computing task by way of parallelism the main concrete motivating question guiding U. Vishkin's research has been ``how to think in parallel?''. New paradigms and methodologies for the development of parallel algorithms that U. Vishkin has been a participant in developing are represented in textbooks on the design of algorithms. In the most cited review publications on parallel algorithms the percentage of references to works that U. Vishkin co-authored is %10 to %20. He also made contributions to the development and understanding of underlying principles for the evolving generation of parallel computer systems. An international speaker, U. Vishkin has authored, or co-authored, over 60 papers in archival journals. He is Fellow of the ACM. The XMT technology was developed since early 1997 with a team of 4 graduate students at the University of Maryland.