SC13 to Feature ACM Athena Lecturer Katherine Yelick

DENVER, CO — The Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has announced that Katherine Yelick of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the 2013-2014 Athena Lecturer. The award honors outstanding women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.

“The Athena Lecturer award is a leading award in the computing community, and is a well-deserved honor that recognizes Dr. Yelick’s rich legacy of accomplishments in the field,” said William D. Gropp, the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois and General Chair of SC13. “Kathy’s research has led to fundamental improvements in the ways in which we think about parallelism in complex applications and express it at large scale.”

Among Yelick’s substantial body of work is co-creation of Unified Parallel C (UPC) and core contributions to the theory and practice of performance analysis, modeling, and optimization for the field of high performance computing. “I am immensely pleased that Kathy Yelick has been selected the Athena Lecturer for 2013 for her work on parallel programming languages,” remarked Vint Cerf, President of ACM and Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. “She epitomizes what all of us at ACM wish for all our members: brilliance, productivity, leadership and inspiration."

“The Athena award recognizes contributions to the entire field of computer science,” continues Gropp. “That the ACM-W chose to recognize such an accomplished researcher from the field of HPC is also a recognition of the growing importance of high performance and technical computing to computer science and to society as a whole.”

Each Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event of her choosing. Yelick's lecture will be featured at SC13 in Denver, CO, November 17-22. “For 25 years the SC conference series has served as the focal point of innovation in the HPC community,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and chair of the SC13 Technical Program. “We are proud that Dr. Yelick has chosen this conference for her lecture, and feel it is entirely in keeping with the SC tradition of excellence and leadership in our field. Kathy’s successful research career and her deep commitment to developing the next generation of computing professionals exemplify the core values of this conference.”

In addition to serving as LBNL's Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences, Yelick is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.  She is also former Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab.  She earned B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About SC13

SC13, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, offers a complete technical program, programs for students and educators in HPC, and an exhibition that together showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning.

Contact: SC13 Communications: communications@info.supercomputing.org