Prof. Vivek Sarkar currently serves as the Chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, where he holds the Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications. He conducts research in multiple aspects of programmability and performance for high-performance computing including programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debugging tools for parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed computer Systems.
Prof. Vivek Sarkar received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1981, and subsequently went on to complete his master and doctorate degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1982 and Stanford University in 1987 respectively.
He began his career in IBM Research after obtaining his doctorate degree from Stanford University, where he was advised by Prof. John Hennessy. At IBM, his research projects included the PTRAN automatic parallelization system, the ASTI optimizer for IBM XL Fortran product compilers, the Jikes Virtual Machine for the Java language, and the X10 programming language for distributed parallel systems. He was a member of IBM Academy of Technology during 1997-2007. After moving to academia, he has mentored over 30 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory that
he created first at Rice University during 2007-2017, and later at Georgia Institute of Technology after 2017. While at Rice University, he was the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, and also served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, and the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. He has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee since 2009, and on the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association since 2015 where he helped create the new CRA-Industry committee which he co-chairs. He was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Kanpur in 2022.
