LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 15 October 2025 – The IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced Saman Amarasinghe, PhD, as this year’s recipient of the Ken Kennedy Award. Amarasinghe, Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and principal investigator, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), received the distinction for his fundamental contributions pioneering high-performance domain-specific languages and compilation techniques for high performance computing (HPC) and exceptional mentorship, and service advancing the global computing community.”
Over the course of his 30-year career, Amarasinghe has made fundamental and impactful contributions to high-performance compiler technology and domain-specific languages. Modern hardware presents a complex model of computation that promises high performance, but only if the compiler can successfully bridge the challenging gap between the software and hardware to fully exploit the hardware resources. Consistently, Amarasinghe has produced language designs and sophisticated compiler algorithms that successfully bridge this gap.
Specifically, he has developed Halide in collaboration with PhD student Jonathan Ragan-Kelly and Dr. Fredo Durand. Halide, an image processing language, enables programmers to create portable algorithms and rapidly iterate over different schedules to obtain the highest performance on each architecture. Today, Halide is used broadly. For instance, all YouTube videos are processed by Halide programs during ingest processing. Adobe Photoshop image processing filters are written in Halide. And even some banking apps that scan checks use Halide code.
Additionally, he developed SLP in collaboration with his PhD student Sam Larsen. SLP, a compiler optimization, automatically generates code optimized for modern short vector units. It finds independent, isomorphic operations within a basic block and combines them to form vector instructions. Because of this work, today, essentially all production compilers have both a traditional loop vectorizer and an SLP vectorizer, with the SLP vectorizer essential for fully exploiting the performance of modern processors.
Amarasinghe has also been instrumental in the development of other solutions such as StreamIt, which introduced novel concepts including structured stream languages; teleport messaging semantics for off-band communication in a precise timing model; new optimization techniques, such as coarse-grained
software pipelining to unify the exploitation of coarse-grained task; and TACO, the first system to automatically generate sparse tensor code with performance equal to or exceeding manually optimized code for general tensor operations.
Amarasinghe has a wide range of notable and widely cited research projects, spanning data parallel compilation, dataflow languages and architectures (RAW), and autotuning and machine learning (ML) techniques for automated compiler optimization (OpenTuner, Ithemal), and much more, with each being influential in the research community, as well as the larger global community.
“The contributions of Dr. Amarasinghe to the field of HPC are many and varied,” said Mary Hall, chair of the 2025 ACM/IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Subcommittee. “His work, which impacts billions of people daily, has informed high performance computing and enables the world at large to leverage its power in unique ways. We are honored to recognize Dr. Amarasinghe for HPC work that has delivered systems that better serve the industry and our world.”
Nominations for the 2026 Ken Kennedy Award are now open. Nominators must answer a series of questions about the candidate, upload a letter of recommendation, and solicit two endorsers to support the candidate; self-nominations are not accepted. Submissions must be received by 30 June 2026. For more information or to submit, visit https://www.computer.org/volunteering/awards/kennedy.
About the Ken Kennedy Award
ACM and IEEE CS co-sponsor the Ken Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The Ken Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by IEEE CS and ACM.
About the IEEE Computer Society
Engaging computer engineers, scientists, academia, and industry professionals from all areas and levels of computing, the IEEE Computer Society (CS) serves as the world’s largest and most established professional organization of its type. IEEE CS sets the standard for the education and engagement that fuels continued global technological advancement. Through conferences, publications, and programs that inspire dialogue, debate, and collaboration, IEEE CS empowers, shapes, and guides the future of not only its 375,000+ community members, but the greater industry, enabling new opportunities to better serve our world. Visit computer.org for more information.