About ACM - IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society named Ian Foster, a Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, as the recipient of the 2022 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes pathbreaking achievements in parallel (high performance) computing. Foster is cited for contributions to programming and productivity in computing via the establishment of new programming models and foundational science services.

Foster has pioneered new approaches to the use of distributed computing for accelerating scientific discovery throughout his career, both within supercomputers and over networks. He has repeatedly proposed out-of-the-box ideas that proved transformative for computer science and computational science: large- scale task-parallel programming, on-demand distributed computations ("grid computing"), virtual organizations, universal data transfer, trust fabrics, and cloud management services for data-intensive science. Each has contributed to programmability and productivity in computing.

Select Technical Contributions
High-level task parallelism: Parallelism has traditionally meant data parallelism and low-level message passing. Recognizing that many interesting task-parallel computations were difficult to realize with such tools, Foster and his colleagues developed new programming methods that eased the specification of interacting tasks, enabled the composition of existing programs, used deterministic constructs to avoid race conditions, and scaled to large distributed and parallel computer systems. Tools such as Strand, Swift, and most recently Parsl, developed in collaboration with colleagues including Steve Taylor, Mike Wilde, and Kyle Chard, have been used to develop pioneering implementations of task-parallel program structures.

Grid computing: Noting the opportunities offered by high-speed networks in the 1990s, Foster and colleagues, including Carl Kesselman and the late Steve Tuecke, launched an effort to create a unifying fabric of protocols, software, and policies for remote and coordinated use of computers, data, instruments, and software regardless of location. Together, these innovations came to be known as “grid computing.” Grid computing, in turn, led to numerous technical advances, innovative applications, and improvements in science infrastructure. For example, the climate community uses these methods to distribute climate data used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments, while the physics community aggregates hundreds of thousands of CPUs contributed by hundreds of participants around the world who use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.

A universal data fabric: Historically, network engineers have focused on moving bits and high-performance computing experts on managing data. As a result, end-to-end performance between file systems was invariably poor. Foster and colleagues, including Bill Allcock and Raj Kettimuthu, developed new protocols and software for traversing the storage system-network storage system path, harnessing multilevel parallelism within transfers, negotiating protocol parameters, and detecting and recovering from failure. These methods are now used at thousands of sites worldwide and form the foundation for the demilitarized zones (DMZs)—subnetworks that many scientific institutions use to connect to the world.

A universal trust fabric: Determining who is allowed to perform an action on a remote computer is one of the most challenging problems in distributed computing, encompassing cryptography, protocols, infrastructure, and policies. The fact that it is now possible to transfer data from one laboratory to another without any difficulty owes a great deal to work performed by Foster and colleagues, including Rachana Ananthakrishnan, on identity and credential management, secure authentication, distributed authorization—and, above all, the integration of these elements into usable end-to-end systems.

Cloud services for data-intensive science: Foster and Tuecke realized that the emergence of commercial ("public") cloud services offered exciting opportunities to rethink research infrastructure, in particular by offloading responsibility for previously manual processes to cloud-hosted services. The resulting Globus service provides managed identity management, data transfer and replication, data sharing, data publication, and other services to the research community. As of early 2021, Globus is used at 13 national laboratories, 65 countries, and more than 1,500 institutions, has 150,000 registered users and has been used to transfer more than 200 billion files and 1.3 exabytes.

Foster and his team worked with colleagues around the world to implement Globus as an essential data infrastructure element in computing and experimental facilities within projects worldwide and in settings as diverse as US Department of Energy and National Science Foundation supercomputer centers, African universities, and US National Institutes of Health intramural laboratories.

Service to the Field and Mentoring
Foster’s books include "Designing and Building Parallel Programs," the first book published on the web, “The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure,” (two volumes, edited with Carl Kesselman), and "Big Data and Social Science," (two editions), which communicated advanced data science methods to government statistical agencies.

He has designed and lead numerous successful US and international projects, from early grid initiatives to recent collaborations in network modeling and exascale co-design. He has served as general and/or program committee chair for many conferences (e.g., High Performance Distributed Computing, IEEE Cloud, IEEE eScience) and numerous scientific advisory boards (e.g., SLAC Scientific Policy Committee, UK eScience, NZ eScience Infrastructure, NSF Computing Community Consortium). Foster has also welcomed dozens of students and postdocs into his group at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory—people who now are in leadership roles in universities, labs, and companies across the world.

Biographical Background
Ian T. Foster is Senior Scientist, Distinguished Fellow, and Director of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Foster received a BSc Degree in Computer Science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College, United Kingdom.

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the British Computer Society (BCS), the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), and a US Department of Energy Office of Science Distinguished Scientists Fellow. He has received the BCS Lovelace Medal and the IEEE Babbage, Goode, and Kanai Awards. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and CINVESTAV, Mexico.

ACM and IEEE CS 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. The award will be formally presented to Foster in November at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC22).

The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society named David Abramson, a Professor at the University of Queensland, as the recipient of the 2021 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Abramson is recognized for contributions to parallel and distributed computing tools, with application from quantum chemistry to engineering design. He is also cited for his mentorship and service to the field.

Technical Contributions
Abramson has performed pioneering research in the design, implementation, and application of software tools for parallel and distributed systems. He has conducted foundational research in distributed and parallel middleware, addressing programmer productivity and software correctness, and has influenced multiple generations of researchers. His papers have been cited more than 12,000 times.

Two highly-regarded tools developed by Abramson include Nimrod, a family of software systems that support the execution of distributed parameter sweeps, searches, and workflows; and Guard, a performance tuning and debugging tool.

The Nimrod template is common in many fields and is well suited to execution in distributed environments. Nimrod makes it possible to write concisely complex parameter sweeps—which entail executing an algorithm repeatedly with varying parameters—and supports advanced searches that integrate optimization algorithms, design of experiments methods, and scientific workflows. Additionally, the Nimrod project spawned a family of tools that make it easy to specify complex computational experiments and has resulted in a spinoff commercial product called EnFuzion, which has been widely adopted for power grid and simulation.

Abramson designed Guard with a hybrid debugging scheme that tests new versions of a program against reference versions known to be correct. Guard greatly enhances programmers’ ability to locate and fix errors in new software versions. The technology was licensed to Cray Inc. (now HPE) and is distributed on Cray supercomputers. As a result, it has been deployed at major international supercomputing centers, including the US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).

Mentorship
Abramson has been an advisor to two dozen graduate students in computer science, as well as countless undergraduate and high school students.

Among his most important initiatives, Abramson has been an international driver of the PRIME initiative, an NSF-funded University of California San Diego program that enables undergraduate students to take research internships abroad. Inspired by the success of PRIME, he has introduced similar programs for Australian undergraduates to travel abroad for internships, and he has organized travels for Australian students to top research centers in the US and the UK annually for over 12 years. Since 2011, he has run a unique program that supports Australian high school students attending SC, the leading high performance computing conference.

Also in the mentoring arena, Abramson started streaming video HPC seminars that have allowed Australian students to engage with world leaders, and he launched the Early Adopters PhD Workshop at SC09. Distinct from other doctoral showcases, the workshop specifically targets research students from fields outside of computer science who are applying HPC tools in their research.

Service to the Field
Over his career, Abramson has been General Chair, Program Committee Chair, or program committee member of many conferences related to performance and programmer productivity (on average about eight per year), including IPDPS, HiPC, HPC Asia, HPDC, ICPADS, Cluster, SC, CCGrid, Grid and e-Science.

He is currently the Chair of the e-Science Steering Committee and has served in several senior roles in the IEEE/ACM SC series, including Chair of the Technical Papers Committee (2021) and Test of Time Award Committee (2018), Co-chair of the Invited Speakers Committee (2019) and “More than HPC” Plenary Committee (2020).

ACM and IEEE CS 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. The award will be formally presented to Abramson in November at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC21).

A Professor at the University of Queensland, Abramson is currently the Chair of the e-Science Steering Committee and has served in several senior roles in the IEEE/ACM SC series, including Chair of the Technical Papers Committee (2021) and Test of Time Award Committee (2018), Co-chair of the Invited Speakers Committee (2019) and “More than HPC” Plenary Committee (2020).

Over his career, Abramson has been General Chair, Program Committee Chair, or program committee member of many conferences related to performance and programmer productivity, and has mentored students as an advisor, through international internship programs, and by offering seminars and workshops.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society IEEE-CS) named Vivek Sarkar of the Georgia Institute of Technology as the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Sarkar is recognized for "foundational technical contributions to the area of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, as well as leadership contributions to professional service, mentoring, and teaching."

The Kennedy Award recognizes Sarkar’s leadership in several areas. Sarkar has made foundational technical contributions to programmability and productivity in parallel computing, and has developed innovative programming-model, compiler, and runtime technologies for parallel computing that have influenced other researchers, as well as industry products and standards. Sarkar has led open source software projects that have had significant impact on the research community, he has created new pedagogic materials to make parallel programming more accessible to undergraduate students using the Coursera learner community, and has mentored junior colleagues at IBM and several PhD students after moving to academia. He has also demonstrated leadership in community service by serving as program chair and general chair for major conferences in his research area, serving on US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) advisory committee since 2009, and on the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors since 2015.

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 $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE-CS and ACM.

An ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, Sarkar is Chair of the School of Computer Science and the Stephen Fleming Chair in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Sarkar started his career in IBM Research in 1987 after obtaining his PhD from Stanford University, where he was supervised by John Hennessy. His research projects at IBM include the PTRAN automatic parallelization system led by Fran Allen, the ASTI optimizer for IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, the open source Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, and the X10 programming language developed in the DARPA HPCS program. He was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology from 1995-2007.

After moving to academia, Sarkar has mentored over 30 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory, first at Rice University since 2007, and now at Georgia Tech since 2017. While at Rice, Sarkar was the E. D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, and served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science. Researchers in his lab have developed the Habanero-C/C++ and Habanero-Java programming systems for parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed platforms. These systems introduced new constructs for homogeneous and heterogeneous intra-node parallelism, as well as their integration with scalable inter-node communication libraries.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society IEEE-CS) named Geoffrey C. Fox of Indiana University Bloomington as the recipient of the 2019 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Fox was cited for foundational contributions to parallel computing methodology, algorithms and software, and data analysis, and their interfaces with broad classes of applications. The award will be presented at SC19: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 17-22, in Denver, Colorado.

Through a long and distinguished career, Fox has made several important technical contributions to high performance computing. Fox identified the principles behind the use of decomposition and efficient message passing in early MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) hypercubes, which pioneered application development on parallel machines. In several well-received papers, Fox demonstrated the synergies between Message Passing Interface (MPI) and MapReduce. In one paper, for instance, he introduced the programming model and architecture of Twister, an enhanced map-reduce runtime that supports iterative MapReduce computations efficiently. His more recent Twister 2 system systematically provides HPC performance with functionalities similar to Apache Spark, Flink, Storm, and Heron. His recent work at the interface of HPC and data-intensive computing has resulted in the SPIDAL (Scalable Parallel and Interoperable Data-intensive Application Library) project. SPIDAL supports a very diverse collection of data-intensive applications on high performance computing platforms.

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 $5,000 honorarium endowed by the SC Conference Steering Committee.

Fox’s service to the community includes involvement with several organizations, including the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, to identify research opportunities in computing for the students and staff of minority serving institutions (MSIs). Since 1997, he has also taught Java and parallel computing courses across the internet to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and MSIs. Fox’s massive online open course, “Big Data Applications,” was cited by Computerworld as one of the “7 Great MOOCs for Techies,” and he has made important contributions to computing standards through leadership roles with the Open Grid Forum and the Java Grande Forum. Fox has also taken on many volunteer roles, including General Chair, of several conferences and workshops.

Fox is Director of the Digital Science Center and a distinguished professor at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. He was principal investigator of FutureGrid, a new cyberinfrastructure test to enable development of new approaches to scientific computing. He has published more than 1,200 publications in physics and computer science. Fox has previously held positions at the California Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and Florida State University. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University.

Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Her honors include being named a Woman of Vision in innovation by the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology in 2012, an IEEE Fellow in 2012, and an ACM Fellow in 2010. She also received the SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2008. For three of the last five years, the University of Illinois has selected her students' PhD theses as one of two nominations for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Adve’s broader research interests are at the hardware/software interface and span the system stack from hardware to applications, with current focus on scalable system specialization and resiliency. She is also known for her innovations in cache coherence, hardware reliability, and power management.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society IEEE-CS) named Sarita Adve of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the recipient of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Adve was cited for her research contributions and leadership in the development of memory consistency models for C++ and Java; for service to numerous computer science organizations; and for exceptional mentoring. The award will be presented at SC 18: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 11-16, in Dallas, Texas

Adve co-developed the memory models for the C++ and Java programming languages (with Hans Boehm, Bill Pugh, and others) based on her early work on data-race-free (DRF) models (with Mark Hill).  The memory model specifies what value a read of a memory address will return, and lies at the heart of the correctness and performance of threaded programs, languages, compilers, and hardware. By impacting the models of the most widely-used programming languages, Adve’s work has influenced the worldwide software community and hardware design.

More recently, with her students, Adve questioned the conventional wisdom of memory models for heterogeneous systems and showed that DRF is a superior model, even for such systems. Her group’s recent work on DRFrlx provides semantics for a large class of relaxed atomics within the DRF framework, a longstanding open problem in the specification of modern memory models.

Adve’s broader research interests are at the hardware/software interface and span the system stack from hardware to applications, with current focus on scalable system specialization and resiliency. She is also known for her innovations in cache coherence, hardware reliability, and power management.

Adve is also recognized for her service to the computing community. As current chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH), she instituted many changes inspiring new energy in the functioning of the executive committee, leading to new effective programs in communications, research visioning, and mentoring. With colleagues, she made diversity and inclusion a key focus and led the creation of CARES, a committee to provide support to those who experienced harassment at SIGARCH- and SIGMICRO-sponsored events. Other communities have begun to emulate these activities. Adve also serves on the DARPA ISAT study group and previously served on the board of the Computing Research Association and the NSF CISE advisory committee.

Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her honors include being named a Woman of Vision in innovation by the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology in 2012, an IEEE Fellow in 2012, and an ACM Fellow in 2010. She also received the SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2008. For three of the last five years, the University of Illinois has selected her students' PhD theses as one of two nominations for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

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 $5,000 honorarium endowed by the SC Conference Steering Committee.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society IEEE CS) have named Jesύs Labarta of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) as the recipient of the 2017 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.  Labarta is recognized for his seminal contributions to programming models and performance analysis tools for high performance computing. The award will be presented at SC 17: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 12-17, in Denver, Colorado.

Throughout his career, Labarta has developed tools for scientists and engineers working in parallel programming.  In the programming models area, he made fundamental contributions to the concept of asynchronous task-based models and intelligent runtime systems. With Labarta’s approach, by using pragma directives that specify the region of code that constitutes tasks and the directionality of the data used by them, the programmer has a unified mechanism to allow intelligent runtime systems to detect and exploit concurrency as well as to manage locality. These ideas have been developed by Labarta’s team on the OmpSs model and Nanos runtime.  His team’s work has also enhanced the interoperability between OmpSs (later Open multi-processing (MP)) and message passing interface (MPI).

In the performance tools area, Labarta’s team develops and distributes Open Source Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) tools that are employed throughout the field. These BSC tools are designed to analyze an application’s behavior and identify issues that may impact performance. Paraver, the most widely used BSC tool, is a trace-based performance analyzer that processes and extracts information. Other tools like Dimemas or the Performance Analytics modules developed by Labarta’s team help squeeze relevant insight and perform predictive analyses from the raw performance data captured by the instrumentation packages.

Labarta is Director of the Computer Science Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and a Professor of Computer Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.  From 1996 to 2004 he served as the Director of the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA). He has published more than 250 articles in conferences and journals in areas including high performance architectures and systems software.  He has been involved in research and cooperation with many leading companies on HPC-related topics. Currently Labarta is the leader of the Performance Optimization and Productivity EU Center of Excellence where more than 100 users (both academic and SMEs) from a very wide range of application sectors receive performance assessments and suggestions for code refactoring efforts.

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 the SC Conference Steering Committee.

Jesύs Labarta is Director of the Computer Science Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and a Professor of Computer Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.  From 1996 to 2004 he served as the Director of the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA). He has published more than 250 articles in conferences and journals in areas including high performance architectures and systems software.  He has been involved in research and cooperation with many leading companies on HPC-related topics. Currently Labarta is the leader of the Performance Optimization and Productivity EU Center of Excellence where more than 100 users (both academic and SMEs) from a very wide range of application sectors receive performance assessments and suggestions for code refactoring efforts.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society have named William D. Gropp, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as the recipient of the 2016 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for highly influential contributions to the programmability of high performance parallel and distributed computers. The award will be presented at SC 16: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, beginning November 13 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Gropp was one of the leaders in the development of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the de facto standard for programming distributed-memory computers in scientific applications, and has enabled a wide range of scientists and engineers to use the enormous performance potential of highly parallel computer systems for over two decades. He was a key author in the development of MPI-I, MPI-2, and MPI-3. As part of the standardization process, Gropp also designed and developed MPICH, the first functional implementation of MPI. This freely available software remains one of the most widely used implementations of MPI, with nearly 2,000 downloads per month.

Along with collaborators David Keyes and Xiao-Chuan Cai, Gropp developed and analyzed key scalable parallel algorithms for adaptive mesh refinement and domain decomposition methods, which are now widely used in parallel applications. This work led to the development of a numerical library, the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), which Gropp developed in collaboration with Barry Smith. PETSc has been used in a variety of applications, including nanosimulations, biology, fusion, geosciences, environmental modeling, fluid dynamics and software engineering, among others.

In bestowing the Ken Kennedy Award, ACM and IEEE also cited Gropp’s outstanding service to the field. In 2011, Gropp helped launch the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC), the first international group devoted to the needs of students, faculty and practitioners in high performance computing. He also served as the editor of CONNECT, the newsletter for SIGHPC, as chair of the Gordon Bell Prize Committee, and in various capacities for numerous conference committees.

Gropp holds the Thomas M. Siebel Chair of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He is also the Acting Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He has authored more than 187 technical publications, including the book Using MPI, which is in its third edition and has sold over 18,000 copies. Gropp received the 2014 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering, along with the PETSc Core Development Team (Satish Balay, Jed Brown, Matthew Knepley, Lois Curfman McInnes, Barry Smith and Hong Zhang). He was elected an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and SIAM Fellow, and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Katherine Yelick  has been awarded the 2015 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for innovative research contributions to parallel computing languages that have been used in both the research community and in production environments. She was also cited for her strategic leadership of the national research laboratories and for developing novel educational and mentoring tools. The award will be presented at SC 15: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis November 17, 2016 in Austin, TX.