Keshav Pingali Named 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award Recipient
October 4, 2023
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) have named Keshav Pingali, the W.A. ”Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, as the recipient of the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes groundbreaking achievements in parallel and high performance computing. Pingali is cited for contributions to high-performance parallel computing for irregular algorithms such as graph algorithms. He is also cited for leadership on the Galois Project, which provides a unifying framework for parallelizing both irregular and regular algorithms.
Pingali has made deep and wide-ranging contributions to many areas of parallel computing including programming languages, compilers, and runtime systems for multicore, manycore and distributed computers. These 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.
Pingali received a Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal; a Master of Science (SM) and Electrical Engineering (EE) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea, and a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the 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.
