Dr. David J. Kuck

One of the most influential figures in parallel computing, especially in productivity tools for parallel programming, over the past four decades, he influenced a wide range of areas including architecture design and evaluation, compiler technology, programming languages, and algorithms. He is a major contributor in creating OpenMP, a cross-platform, directive-based parallel programming approach which is especially friendly in multi-core environment. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, he received both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from Northwestern University. He was a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from 1965 to 1993. While there he developed the Parafrase compiler system (1977), which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations. In his role as Director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD-UIUC) from 1986 to 1993, he led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared-memory 32-processor SMP supercomputer completed in 1988. He founded Kuck and Associates (KAI) in 1979 to build a line of industry-standard optimizing compilers especially focused upon exploiting parallelism. After CSRD, he transferred his full attentions to KAI and its clients at various U.S. National Laboratories. KAI was acquired by Intel in March 2000, where he currently serves as an Intel Fellow, Software and Solutions Group, and Director of the Parallel and Distributed Solutions Division (PDSD). He was the sole software person on the ILLIAC IV project in contrast to all the other hardware-oriented members. He is responsible not only for developing many of the initial ideas of how to restructure computer source code for parallelism but also trained many of that field's major players around the world. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Among his awards are the Eckert-Mauchly Award from ACM/IEEE and the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award. In 2010 he was selected to receive the Ken Kennedy Award, given by ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, ?for Innovations in High-Performance Computing?. He was also a 2011 Computer Pioneer Award Recipient, "For pioneering parallel architectures including the Illiac IV, the Burroughs BSP, and Cedar; and, for revolutionary parallel compiler technology including Parafrase and KAP Tools". Each year, two awards are given in his name for outstanding theses: The David J. Kuck Outstanding MS Thesis Award, and the David J. Kuck Outstanding PhD Thesis Award. These awards were established by alumni, former students and friends in recognition of his intellectual and leadership contributions. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck.