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Biography: Dr. Ekpe Okorafor

Dr. Ekpe Okorafor received the B.Eng. in Electronic and Computer Engineering, from the University of Nigeria in 1996. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees all in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002 and 2005 respectively, from Texas A&M University. His Ph.D research area included high performance communication networks, with a focus on optical and hybrid architectures. As communication becomes more critical in determining the overall performance and cost of a system, an efficient interconnection network is needed to fully utilize the technology available to maintain high performance while reducing the cost of the system. His research explored the use of optics and optical techniques to exploit the increasing bandwidth trend and reduce the cost while increasing the performance of an interconnection network.

Currently, he is working on exploring all-optical self-routing dynamic reconfiguration mechanism suitable for a bimodal traffic combining both packet-switched and circuit-switched data in an effective manner to maximize link utilization, minimize communication latencies and improve overall performance. He is developing dynamic hybrid routing heuristics and adapting these to novel dynamic reconfiguration and routing algorithms suited for asynchronous bufferless optical networks that incorporate optical routing logic. Other projects include work on a long standing open problem of a universal packet-switched algorithm with near optimal performance guarantees for the class of bufferless networks, where the buffer size for packets in transit is zero. Dr. Okorafor’s research interests include computer architecture and networks, optical interconnection networks, parallel and distributed computing, fault-tolerant routing, performance modeling and optimization. He has authored and co-authored many conference papers and journal publications. He is a member of IEEE and OSA, including many peer-review panels for both conference proceedings and journal publications. He has worked in leading research labs including IBM Watson Research and Almaden Research Centers.

Selected Publications

Ekpe Okorafor, "Integrated hybrid optical node using dynamic reconfiguration and routing algorithms for bimodal traffic," Journal of Optical Networks, vol. 6, pp1191-1209 (2007) [1].

Ekpe Okorafor, All-Optical Routing for High Assurance Computer Systems, IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering, HASE’07, Nov. 2007.

Ekpe Okorafor, Reliability and Fault Tolerant Percolation Routing for Large-Scale Computer Systems Using Optical Interconnections, Intl. Conf. on Communications in Computing (CIC’07), June 2007.

Ekpe Okorafor, A Scalable 3-D Multicomputer Architecture Using Optical Interconnection Capable of Sustaining PetaFLOP Computing, Intl. Conf. on Communications in Computing (CIC’07), June 2007.

Ekpe Okorafor and Mi Lu, Percolation Routing in a 3-Dimensional Multicomputer Network Topology Using Optical Interconnection, Journal of Optical. Networks (JON), vol. 4, pp157-175 (2005) [2].