Omar Mansour is a 4th-year PhD student from the department of Computer Science. He is researching ways to improve the performance of signal processors within high-throughput applications.
Omar explains, 'Typical examples of high-throughput applications involve radar signal processing, video processing, digital TV, medical instruments etc. Throughput is the rate at which a processor can work, expressed in instructions per second or jobs per hour or some other unit of performance. Nowadays, most of the hardware synthesis tools, which are used to implement the processor chips, use static scheduling techniques for scheduling their resources or hardware elements of the processor that are used to perform the actual work. This has some disadvantages when the time needed to do a certain job is not fixed.
For instance, to compute a greatest common denominator in a static scheduling system, 23 clock cycles may be ordered when the actual time taken to compute is only 10 clock cycles. In such a case 13 clock cycles are wasted. Dynamic scheduling avoids this kind of waste. In our project we therefore use a dynamic scheduling approach in order to avoid the problems of static scheduling. In order to improve the performance of the dynamic-scheduling, the scheduler itself is implemented in hardware' .
Omar is half-Dutch and half-Egyptian and has spent most of his life in Egypt. 'I did my schooling in Egypt and then a Btech in General and Electrical Engineering from Surrey School of Technology, England. For further studies, I found the fees for the university course in England exorbitant and hence decided to come to the Netherlands where I could exercise my Dutch rights to education.
Initially, it was very difficult because I did not speak the language. My mother spoke Dutch only when she was on the phone with family or when she was angry. I remember distinctly, I attended a class on Calculus and did not follow a single word! Also, I had just broken up with my girlfriend in England, which only made things worse. Of course, over time, it got better and I learned to speak the language.'
After obtaining his Master's degree in Computer Science from the UT, Omar worked as a software engineer at 'Signaal' (a radar company in Hengelo, now called Thales) following which he decided to pursue a PhD. 'Getting a bit closer to the results each day, I suppose that keeps me going. The most difficult part is integrating it all into reality.'
Omar used to be a member of Egypt's Modern Pentathlon team. This sport involves horse back riding, fencing, swimming, shooting and running. He continues to practice horse back riding and swimming in the Netherlands.
Future plans? 'Who knows', he says shrugging his shoulders.
Deepa Talasila
Omar Mansour
