David A. Padua is the recipient of the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award which recognizes achievements in parallel and high performance computing (HPC). Padua is cited for innovative and usable contributions to the theory and practice of parallel compilation and tools, as well as service to the computing community.

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

This year the award goes to David A. Padua, the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. According to the ACM:

Padua has made fundamental contributions that have helped make parallel computation universally useful. He has worked at the levels of fundamental algorithms for parallelism, general tools for parallel programming (compilers and debuggers), and domain-specific languages, applications, and tools, as well as autotuning methods and compiler quality evaluation. 

The announcement goes on to explain the significance of some specific contributions achieved by Padua and his students:

• Synchronization of multiple threads during computation is necessary for high performance computers to produce correct results. Two key techniques introduced by Padua and his students to enable the correct synchronization of multiple threads during parallel computing include speculative parallelism and array privatization.
  
  
• Padua and his students introduced much of the basic research that has made general parallel programming tools common today. He was directly involved in developing race detection for debugging parallel programs, as well as array tiling to improve parallelism and cache performance.
  
  
• In HPC, domain-specific parallelism has been especially effective in various special purpose applications. Padua’s contributions in this area include the development of parallel Matlab compilation, and contributions to compilation aspects of signal processing including the SPIRAL project.
  
  
• Padua and his students have made important contributions to the evaluation of compilers, including the vectorizing compiler evaluation techniques which have been used by compiler teams at Intel and other companies.

The award also takes account of other service to the field of parallel and high performance computing. Padua integrated the ideas of parallel computing as editor of the Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing (Springer), a four-volume publication.  He also served as editor of several parallel computing journals, and chaired or participated in program committees for over 70 conferences and supervised 37 PhD dissertations.

With regard to mentoring the ACM notes:

His former students represent a new generation of talented individuals who have gone on to make significant contributions to both academia and industry. 

The Ken Kennedy Award will be formally presented to Padua at SC24, The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis being held in Atlanta, Georgia from November, 17-24

More Information

About ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

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