Keshav Pingali Selected to Receive ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

Los Alamitos, Calif., October 4, 2023 – The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) have named Keshav Pingali, a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.  One of the IEEE CS’s highest awards, the Ken Kennedy Award honors individuals with outstanding achievements in programmability or productivity in high-performance computing, together with significant community service or mentoring contributions. Pingali is cited for “contributions to programmability of high-performance parallel computing on irregular algorithms and graph algorithms."

Pingali has made important contributions to software theory and practice in the areas of compilers, tools and programming languages for parallelism and memory management. His achievements include program transformation algorithms for cache optimization, representations for program restructuring, and symbolic analysis techniques for complex numerical algorithms. These contributions have been incorporated into most open-source and commercial compilers. His most recent research has focused on foundational programming abstractions and implementations for irregular parallel algorithms such as graph algorithms.

One of Pingali’s major contributions is a parallel programming abstraction called the “operator formulation of algorithms,” an imperative programming model that is remarkably simple yet powerful enough to capture patterns of parallelism in both regular and irregular algorithms.  His work has also provided deep insights into the design of high-performance parallel runtime systems for exploiting parallelism in irregular algorithms.

Pingali is the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Pingali received a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India; Masters of Science (S.M.) and Electrical Engineering (E.E.) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a Doctor of Science (Sc.D) degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A recipient of the 2023 IEEE CS Charles Babbage Award for “contributions to high-performance compilers and graph computing,” Pingali is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the ACM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea.

The award, consisting of a certificate and a $5,000 honorarium, will be formally presented to Pingali in November at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC23).

ACM and IEEE CS co-sponsor the Ken Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE CS and ACM.

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