Katherine Yelick, who co-invented the Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Titanium languages and demonstrated their applicability across architectures through the use of novel runtime and compilation methods, has been named the “Athena Lecturer” by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) for improving fundamental understanding and practice of parallel programming.
UPC is an extension of the C programming language designed for high performance computing on large-scale parallel machines. Titanium is an explicitly parallel dialect of Java to support high-performance scientific computing on large-scale multiprocessors.
In addition to co-inventing UPC and Titanium, Yelick’s work also includes automatic performance tuning techniques as well as performance analysis, modeling, and optimization for a range of programming tools. Yelick is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
“Yelick’s innovative software is used in both the research community and in production environments,” Mary Jane Irwin, head of the ACM-W awards committee, said in the announcement of the award. “She has taken on the challenges of software developers in the age of exascale computing and helped them become more efficient in this environment. An effective teacher and mentor, she been a role model for the computing community.”
The Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom; with her knowledge and sense of purpose, she epitomizes the strength, determination, and intelligence of the “Athena Lecturers,” according to ACM. Yelick’s award will be presented at the ACM Annual Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco.