David J. Kuck

2012 Distinguished Academic Achievement Alumni Award

CS Emeritus Professor David Kuck has made major contributions to parallel computing as a researcher, professor, software company founder, and product developer. His work has influenced architecture design and evaluation, compiler technology, programming languages, and algorithms, which has improved the cost-effectiveness of multiprocessor computing.

Kuck joined the University of Illinois computer science department in 1965 as the lone software researcher working on ILLIAC IV, the world’s first supercomputer. Kuck restructured computer source code for parallelism, demonstrating that software could actually be written for the single-instruction, multiple-data machine (SIMD).

In 1979, he founded Kuck and Associates Inc., which created a line of industry-standard optimizing compilers to exploit parallelism. During the 1980s, he founded and led the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, which produced Cedar, a high-performance, large-scale multiprocessing computer that brought supercomputing power to bear on fields such as meteorology, physics, astronomy, and the computer-aided design of computer circuits.

Kuck left the university in 1993, and he sold his company to Intel in 2000. Today, he is an Intel Fellow in the Software and Solutions Group (SSG). He is working on the HW/SW co-design of architectures and applications based on performance, energy, and cost. Under Kuck's leadership, SSG produced industry-leading parallel tools including ThreadChecker, ThreadProfiler, and OpenMP

Kuck is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, and a Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Engineering.