Guy Blelloch

Guy Blelloch is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a BA in Physics and BS in Engineering from Swarthmore College in 1983, and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 1988. He has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1988, and served as Associate Dean of Undergraduate studies from 2016-2020.

His research contributions have been in the interaction of practical and theoretical considerations in parallel algorithms and programming languages.  His early work on implementations and algorithmic applications of the scan (prefix sums) operation has become influential in the design of parallel algorithms for a variety of platforms. His work on the work-span (or work-depth) view for analyzing parallel algorithms has helped develop algorithms that are both theoretically and practically efficient. His work on the Nesl programming language developed the idea of program-based cost-models, and nested-parallel programming. His work on parallel garbage collection was the first to show bounds on both time and space. His work on graph-processing frameworks, such as Ligra and GraphChi and Aspen, have set a foundation for large-scale parallel graph processing. His recent work on analyzing the parallelism in incremental/iterative algorithms has opened a new view to parallel algorithms---i.e., taking sequential algorithms and understanding that they are actually parallel when applied to inputs in a random order. Blelloch is an ACM Fellow.