Pingali Receives Prestigious Parallel Computing Award

At The University of Texas at Austin, Pingali is the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and core faculty in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

"I can't think of a more deserving person to receive the Charles Babbage Award," said Don Fussell, chair and professor of computer science at UT Austin. "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."

On its awards website, IEEE notes Pingali's many contributions to the field. He has made deep and wide-ranging contributions to many areas of parallel computing including programming languages, compilers, and runtime systems for multicore, manycore and distributed computers. These include program transformation algorithms for cache optimization, representations for program restructuring, and symbolic analysis techniques for complex numerical algorithms. These contributions have been incorporated into most open-source and commercial compilers. His most recent research has focused on foundational programming abstractions and implementations for irregular parallel algorithms such as graph algorithms. Pingali is the CEO and co-founder of Katana Graph, which is a startup based on this technology and funded by leading VCs in the tech industry.

Pingali is the winner of multiple awards, including previously receiving recognition as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Pingali received a certificate and a $1,000 honorarium for his contributions to parallel computing. In May of 2023, he will attend a conference in Florida to present his work.