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Indian American professor recognized for achievements in computing
Laxmikant Kale receives 2024 HPDC Achievement Award for pioneering adaptive parallel programming models and runtime systems.
Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Laxmikant Kale. / University of Illinois
Indian American computer science researcher, Laxmikant Kale, has been awarded the 2024 Achievement Award in High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC).
The accolade was presented to Kale at the ACM International Symposium on High-Performance, Parallel and Distributed Computing 2024 conference earlier this month in Pisa, Italy, where he also delivered a keynote address.
The award citation commended Kale for "pioneering development of task-based adaptive parallel programming models and runtime systems, leading to a new category of highly scalable scientific applications."
The Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Kale expressed his gratitude upon receiving the award. "I was honored to receive the award in Pisa," he said. Despite the recognition, Kale was quick to attribute the achievement to his students and colleagues. "While I am grateful for the award, I believe it belongs to my 50-ish PhD students and a similar number of other students and co-workers," he said.
In his keynote speech, Kale traced the evolution of the migratable-objects programming model, embodied in Charm++, Adaptive MPI, and Charm4Py, highlighting the contributions of each generation of graduate students and co-designed application codes.
Kale's career is marked by a cross-disciplinary approach, starting around 1991 with collaborations in Fluid Dynamics and biophysics at the Beckman Institute. His parallel programming system, Charm++, initially developed for combinatorial search applications, evolved to meet the real-world needs of research scientists through a process of "co-development and co-design."
Under Kale's leadership, the Parallel Programming Laboratory at the University of Illinois developed several languages and systems for parallel programming, most notably Charm++. This adaptive task-based programming system has enabled significant advancements in scalable parallel applications, including the ChaNGa cosmological simulation and the NAMD biomolecular simulation program, which visualized the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic.
Throughout his career, Kale has been recognized with numerous accolades, including the Gordon Bell Prize in 2002 and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2012. He is a fellow of both the ACM and IEEE. His work has been cited over 42,000 times, and he holds an h-index of 69. Although he retired from teaching in 2019, Kale continues his active research program as a research professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Kale received his B.Tech degree in Electronics Engineering from Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, India in 1977, and a M.E. degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, in 1979. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1985.
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