University of Texas at Austin

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Keshav Pingali Receives Prestigious Parallel Computing Award

By Rebecca Riley

Published Feb. 15, 2023

Keshav Pingali

Keshav Pingali has been awarded the 2023 Charles Babbage Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society.

Pingali, who has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin for 17 years and holds the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair in Distributed and Grid Computing, was chosen for his wide-ranging contributions to parallel computing. 

"Keshav is a world research leader in parallel and distributed computing, a dedicated educator and mentor to graduate students, and an innovative pioneer in high-performance parallel computing," said Karen Willcox, Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. "We are incredibly fortunate to have him leading the Center for Distributed and Grid Computing here in the Oden Institute."

The Charles Babbage award was established in memory of a mathematician and inventor who is considered by some to be ‘father of the computer’. The honor bearing his name entails a certificate and monetary prize, as well as an invitation to speak at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Florida this May. 

In the 34 years since it was founded, recipients of the award have served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and won the Turing Prize. 

 

Keshav is a brilliant and dedicated researcher — one of those rare people whose contributions have advanced a field in a way that wouldn't have happened without him

— Don Fussell

"I can't think of a more deserving person to receive the Charles Babbage Award,” said Don Fussell, an Oden Institute affiliate faculty member who is Trammell Crow Regents Professor and chair in the Department of Computer Science. “Keshav is a brilliant and dedicated researcher — one of those rare people whose contributions have advanced a field in a way that wouldn't have happened without him.”

Keshav Pingali is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was co-Editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Parallel Programming and Distributed Computing. In 2006, he joined the Oden Institute from Cornell University.

His research concerns the development of programming models, languages, compilers, and runtime systems that enable computer programs to be written at a high level of abstraction without compromising on execution efficiency.