Multi-core computers are ushering in a new era of parallelism everywhere. As more cores (and parallelism) are added, the potential performance of the hardware will continue to increase. But how will users and applications take advantage of all the parallelism? To address this question the speaker will first give her personal, historical perspective on languages and compilers for high performance systems then discuss the challenges and opportunities of universal parallelism.

Fran Allen is an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T. J. Watson Research Laboratory with a specialty in compilers and program optimization for high performance computers. This work led to Allen being named the recipient of ACM’s 2006 Turing Award “For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.”

She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Engineers, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE, and the Computer History Museum. She has served on numerous national technology boards including CISE at the National Science Foundation and the CSTB for the National Research Council. Her many awards and honors include honorary doctorates from the University of Alberta (1991), Pace University (1999), and the University of Illinois at Urbana (2004).

Fran is an active mentor, advocate for technical women in computing, environmentalist, and explorer.