Bio & CV

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 and high performance computer systems.  Prof. Sarkar currently leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Sarkar was a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University and the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering during 2007 – 2017, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science during 2013 – 2016.  While at Rice, Sarkar created the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory, which focuses on unifying parallelism and concurrency elements of high-end computing, multicore, and embedded software stacks.

Prior to joining Rice in 2007, Sarkar was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His research projects at IBM included the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, and the PTRAN automatic parallelization system. Sarkar became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, and was inducted as an ACM Fellow in 2008 and an IEEE Fellow in 2020.  He has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and on CRA’s Board of Directors since 2015.  He was also the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.

Prof. Sarkar’s curriculum vitae can be found here.