David Padua, Illinois Grainger Engineering Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering, has received the 2024 Ken Kennedy Award. He is the fourth Illinois CS faculty member to receive this award; Sarita Adve, William Gropp, and David Kuck previously received it. The ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service or mentoring contributions.
Written by Bruce Adams
David Padua, Illinois Grainger Engineering Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering, has received the 2024 Ken Kennedy Award. He is the fourth Illinois CS faculty member to receive this award; it has been awarded to Sarita Adve, William Gropp, and David Kuck. The ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award recognizes substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and substantial community service or mentoring contributions. Padua was recognized for" contributions to the theory and practice of parallel compilation and tools, as well as outstanding mentorship and community service."
The award will be presented at the SC24 Conference awards plenary session in Atlanta on November 19.
Photo Credit: University of Illinois / Holly Birch Photography
David Padua
Padua has devoted much of his career to studying languages, tools, and compilers for parallel computing. His research is practically a roll call of advancements in the field:
techniques for program analysis and program transformation
methodologies to evaluate the effectiveness of compilers
race detection techniques for shared-memory program
autotuning compiler strategies, advanced notations, accurate performance models, and machine learning‐based search techniques
high level notations for parallel programming
compiler evaluation
the efficient implementation of scripting languages
development of the hierarchically tiled arrays notation, whose goal is to facilitate the representation of parallelism and locality.
Paudua’s Polaris Research Group collaborated with IBM compiler writers in an influential evaluation of the effectiveness of vectorization. In scripting languages, the group developed techniques to improve the performance of MATLAB and R programs.
Padua has supervised the dissertations of 30 PhD students. He has published more than 170 papers in programming languages, compilers, tools and parallel machine design. Padua has served as a program committee member, program chair, or general chair to more than 70 conferences and workshops. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Springer‐Verlag’s Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and the International Journal of Parallel Programming. He received the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Award. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid in Spain. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE and the AAAS.