ABOUT THIS AWARD
Awarded to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. The Software System Award carries a prize of $35,000. Financial support for the Software System Award is provided by IBM.
Adve, Cheng, Lattner recipients of the 2012 Software System Award
LLVM is a language-independent collection of programming technologies that enables code analysis and transformation for arbitrary programming languages. A collection of compiler technologies that turn programming languages into machine code used by processors, LLVM is widely used in commercial products as well as computer science research. Key factors in its success are the openness of its technology and the quality of its architecture and engineering as well as its clean, flexible design and easy-to-use programming interfaces.
The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the direction of
Chris Lattner (now director of Developer Tools at Apple) and
Vikram Adve, a professor at UIUC.
Evan Cheng drove the design and implementation of the code generator in LLVM, and is now a senior manager at Apple. In the years since its release, LLVM has been incorporated into commercial products by Apple, Adobe, AMD, Arxan, AutoESL, Cray, Google, Intel, and many others.
