Vivek Sarkar is Professor and Chair of the School of Computer Science, and the Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He conducts research in multiple aspects of parallel computing software including programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debuggers for parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed high-performance computer systems. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Sarkar was a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University and the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science. Prof. Sarkar leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech, which was created while he was at Rice.
Sarkar started his career in IBM Research after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford University, supervised by John Hennessy. His research projects at IBM include the PTRAN automatic parallelization system led by Fran Allen, the ASTI optimizer for IBM’s XL product compilers, the open-source Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, and the X10 programming language developed in the DARPA HPCS program. Sarkar is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a former member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and a recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. He served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA) during 2015-2022, and is a founding co-chair of the CRA-Industry committee since 2021. He has been a member of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and a member of the ACM Council since 2022.
Prof. Sarkar’s curriculum vitae can be found here.