Frances Allen
Allen's compiler research made programs more efficiently executable and supported automatic parallelization. Her career also documents a foundational contribution to computer science from an IBM researcher who became the company's first woman IBM Fellow and the first woman to receive the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist who spent her career at IBM and became a pioneer in optimizing compilers and parallel computing. She joined IBM in 1957, initially teaching new employees FORTRAN.
Compiler research
Allen's work advanced the theory and practice of program optimization: the analysis and transformation of programs into more efficient machine instructions. The ACM's Turing Award citation recognized this work as foundational to modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution.
In memoriam
Allen died in 2020 on her eighty-eighth birthday. IBM, ACM, and the Computer History Museum have preserved accounts of her technical work and her long record of mentoring researchers and engineers.
Timeline
- 1957Joins IBM Research as a programmer.
- 1989Becomes the first woman named an IBM Fellow.
- 2006Receives the ACM A.M. Turing Award for compiler-optimization research.
- 2020-08-04Dies in Schenectady, New York.
Frances Allen
- Type
- Person
- Era
- 1950s-2020
- Born
- 1932-08-04
- Died
- 2020-08-04
- Known for
- Optimizing compilers; Automatic parallelization; IBM Fellow; ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Tags
- compiler-optimization, programming-languages, high-performance-computing, ibm, academic-research, women-in-computing
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