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sARitA ADVe WiNs
WomeN of VisioN AWARD Sarita Adve, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, recently won the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology’s Women of Vision award in the category of Innovation. Her current work involves developing disciplined parallel programming practices
and rethinking the multicore
memory hierarchy to exploit
this discipline.
Adve’s interest in what she
calls “undisciplined software
and software-oblivious
hardware” dates back 20 years
to her Ph.D. thesis. At that time,
the semantics of hardware
and the hardware-software
interface in parallel computing
were ill-defined and difficult to
understand. Different vendors
used different semantics, which
was tolerated because parallel
computing was a niche. Those
having a hardware-centric point
of view used optimizations
to make do, but the interface
made little sense from a
programmability perspective,
Adve says. Her contribution was
to regard the situation not as a
hardware or a software problem,
but as a hardware-software
problem. “We needed to figure
out what programmers want
and have hardware agree to
provide that in the interface.
I proposed a contract; software
developers would write
programs in this well-structured
way, which I formalized as data-
race free programs, and
the hardware side would provide
sequential consistency, which
is what programmers like.”
— Karen A. Frenkel
