The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and Operating Systems (SIGOPS), together with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), today honored Maurice Herlihy, J. Eliot B. Moss, Nir Shavit, and Dan Touitou with the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing them for their work on transactional memory in the mid-1990s that transformed parallel computing. The four received the award at the 2012 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2012) in Madeira, Portugal, this morning.

According to ACM’s press release (following the link):

In terms of fostering research, transactional memory has become a truly transformative idea for parallel computing in shared memory systems, where all processors share a memory that can be used to exchange information between processors. Nearly 1,400 citations were recorded for the Herlihy and Moss paper since it was published, and almost 1,000 citations were reported for the Shavit and Touitou paper. In addition, software architects have developed dozens of runtime implementations of remarkable algorithmic variety. At least four major compilers now support transactional memory in C++. Hardware implementations have been developed by Azul, Sun (Oracle), AMD (on paper), IBM, and Intel. The IBM and Intel implementations, in particular, ensure that hardware support is likely to continue.

The Dijkstra Prize, which includes an award of $2,000, “is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing have been evident for at least a decade.”

To learn more, check out the press release here — or this summary of this year’s prize.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)