Banerjee Lecture

The Utpal Banerjee Distinguished Lecture Series in High-Performance Computing

An adjunct professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, Utpal Banerjee spent nearly 20 years of his career at Intel in the Software Solutions Group, where he developed techniques to enhance the performance of multi-core processors.

In the early days of parallel computing, while working as a graduate student for Illinois CS Professor David Kuck, Banerjee developed a strategy for automatically analyzing a loop and determining whether it could be executed in parallel. His method, later dubbed Banerjee’s test, was a simple, fast, and effective data dependence test widely used for compiler development and has significantly impacted advancing compiler technology.

While at Intel, he developed a formal representation and generalization of loop transformation techniques. By formalizing code transformation, Banerjee created the foundations of modern work on program restructuring, now known as the polyhedron model. In the 1990s, he wrote several books on loop dependence and transformations for restructuring compilers. Banerjee is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.

When Utpal Banerjee died in 2017, his family members said they were only beginning to understand the Illinois Computer Science alumnus's impact on high-performance computing. As a result, his daughter, Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, and her family have established the Utpal Banerjee Distinguished Lecture Series in High Performance Computing. Through their gift, they are able to both honor his memory and provide a platform for the department to showcase one of the areas in which it excels and to remember one of its own in a lasting way.

Banerjee Lecturers