ACM Honors Blelloch's Work in Algorithm Engineering

Guy Blelloch, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is part of a team that received this year's Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, which honors accomplishments that have significantly impacted the practice of computing.

Also recognized were Blelloch's former advisee, Laxman Dhulipala, who earned his Ph.D. in CMU's Computer Science Department (CSD) and is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland; and Julian Shun, who also earned his Ph.D. in CSD, now an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The ACM cited the trio for their contributions to algorithm engineering, which revolutionized large-scale graph processing on shared-memory machines.

In 2013, Blelloch, Dhulipala and Shun began exploring ways to analyze huge graphs with billions of vertices and hundreds of billions of edges on inexpensive, shared-memory multiprocessors. They developed several frameworks that allowed programmers to solve graph problems more efficiently on an inexpensive, multicore shared-memory machine. One such framework was the Ligra approach, which demonstrated that shared-memory computers provided the ideal platform for analyzing large graphs. The awardees also recently developed Aspen, a novel graph streaming system that uses purely functional data structures to enable low-latency updates and snapshots on massive graph datasets. 

Learn more about the award on the ACM's website.