Ken Kennedy is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice University, an NSF Science and Technology Center that includes seven participating institutions and six affiliated sites across the country. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and he has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1990. He currently serves as co-chair of the White House Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet.
Through the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, he is seeking to develop new strategies for supporting architecture-independent parallel programming, especially in science and engineering. To that end, he serves as director of the High Performance Fortran Forum, which has defined a set of extensions to Fortran 90 that support data-parallel programming. In recognition of his contributions to software for high performance computers, he received the 1995 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest research award of the IEEE Computer Society.