Katherine (Kathy) Anne Yelick

Co-inventor of Unified Parallel C (UPC), a programming language extension designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, Yelick is an internationally recognized expert in high performance computing.

Yelick has served as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley from 1991 and has held a joint research appointment at Berkeley Lab from 1996. She has also served as the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and from 2008 to 2012, she served as the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the Scientific Networking Division (home to the Energy Sciences Network, ESnet) and the Computational Research Division. In her role as Associate Laboratory Director she oversaw NERSC, the Energy Science Network (ESNet), and a research organization in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and Computational Science.

Yelick co-invented the Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Titanium languages and developed analyses, optimizations, and runtime systems for their implementation. UPC is an extension of the C programming language designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, including those with a common global address space (SMP and NUMA) and those with distributed memory (e.g. clusters). In addition, she co-developed techniques for self-tuning numerical libraries, including the first self-tuned library for sparse matrix kernels, which automatically adapt the code to properties of the matrix structure and machine.

She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning her Ph.D. in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1990. In 1991, she became a Professor in both fields at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). In 2012 she was named as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and in 2013 she received the ACM Athena Lecturer award.

Yelick is an author of many peer reviewed articles and two books. She has received multiple research and teaching awards, including the Athena award, and has served on study committees for the National Research Council. She has been a member of the California Council on Science and Technology, the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and the Science and Technology Board overseeing research at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

She served as the Keynote Speaker for the 8th International Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models, October 7–10, 2014 at the University of Oregon and Hilton Eugene Conference Center, Eugene, Oregon. Yelick is married to UC Berkeley co-faculty James Demmel, who also worked in Computer Science and Numerical Linear Algebra.