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Frances Allen Receives the Turing Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen, an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T.J. Watson Research Center, is the first woman to ever receive the prize which is widely considered as the “Nobel Prize” of Computing.

According to her official IBM biography: "as a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, she has made seminal contributions to the field. Her work on inter procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to be on the leading edge of compiler research. She has successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and Parallel FORTRAN". The outstanding work performed by Allen made it possible to achieve high performance from computers while programming them in languages suitable to applications. They have contributed to advances in the use of high performance computers for solving problems such as weather forecasting, DNA matching, and national security functions.

The Turing Award, first presented in 1966, and named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The prize carries a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation. ACM will present the Turing Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 9, 2007, in San Diego, CA.

More information on Frances E. Allen and the Turing award could be found on the ACM website.

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