Fifty Years of Parallel Programming: Ieri, Oggi, Domani
Lecturer: Prof. Keshav Pingali
Location: Aula Aldo La Ginestra, Edificio di Chimica (Città Universitaria), Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5
Date and time: Monday March 20th, 12:00-13:00
Keshav Pingali is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Computing in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at UT Austin. He was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University from 1986 to 2006, where he held the India Chair of Computer Science. He has a PhD from MIT, and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President's Gold Medal.
Pingali's research has focused on programming languages and compiler technology for program understanding, restructuring, and optimization. His group is known for its contributions to memory-hierarchy optimization; some of these have been patented and are in use in industry compilers. His current research is focused on programming models and tools for high-performance graph computing.
Pingali is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM and AAAS. He received the IIT Kanpur Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013, and the IEEE CS Charles Babbage Award in 2023.
Between 2008 and 2011, he was the co-Editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He has also served on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee. He is currently the CEO of Katana Graph, a start-up in the graph computing area backed by leading investors from Silicon Valley.
Abstract. Parallel programming started around 1970 so as a discipline, it is now more than 50 years old. What have we learned in the past 50 years about parallel programming? What problems have we solved and what problems remain to be solved? What can young researchers learn from the successes and failures of our discipline? This talk presents a personal point of view about these and other questions regarding the state of parallel programming. I will also discuss my experience in doing a start-up called Katana Graph, which is based on my work in parallel computing.