Keshav Pingali is the W.A.”Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before moving to UT Austin, Pingali was the India Chair of Computing in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He holds the B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in India, where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal, and the SM, EE and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pingali has made deep and wide-ranging contributions to many areas of parallel computing including programming languages, compilers, and runtime systems for multicore, manycore and distributed computers. These include program transformation algorithms for cache optimization, representations for program restructuring, and symbolic analysis techniques for complex numerical algorithms. These contributions have been incorporated into most open-source and commercial compilers. His most recent research has focused on foundational programming abstractions and implementations for irregular parallel algorithms such as graph algorithms.
Pingali is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea. He has delivered numerous plenary keynotes on his work at the top parallel computing conferences. In 1998, the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University awarded him the Stephen & Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching for “superlative performance in the classroom.” He was recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus by IIT Kanpur in 2013. In 2023, he was the recipient of the IEEE Charles Babbage award. He has served on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee (2009-2012), and he was co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (2007-2010).