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Frances Allen has died

by ntumlin on 8/5/20, 11:46 PM with 101 comments

• by sanxiyn on 8/6/20, 1:50 AM

  Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations" in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is autovectorization.

  She was in her 30s when she wrote it.

• by MarkCC on 8/7/20, 1:01 AM

  I worked at IBM research from 1997 until 2007, after finishing my PhD in compilers and programming languages.

  About two weeks after I started working there, she showed up in my office, and introduced herself. She'd heard about a new PL person joining, and she'd gone and gotten my dissertation and read it, so that she could come talk to me about it. Not that my dissertation was anything special: that's just the way that Fran was.

  She was an amazing person. Brilliant, and kind, and generous. The world needs more people like her.

• by graycat on 8/6/20, 8:27 AM

  Fran and I were on the same floor at IBM's Watson lab. I was in an AI project doing applied math, e.g., some optimization, and mathematical statistics (for the AI work we were doing, system monitoring, i.e., anomaly detection, better than our AI work!). She was regarded as a major expert in compiling and numerical codes for scientific computing.

  I heard that she was working on a software product that among many other things would do fast matrix multiplication using some parallelism.

  So, just for the heck of it, I wrote and ran a little routine in PL/I that used PL/I's feature of multi-tasking to get some parallelism and showed my code to her. She was a little surprised I'd written the code, had a smile, and explained why her work closer to some hardware features (I don't recall the details) would be faster!

  I wasn't surprised or disappointed that my little PL/I tasking code would be slower than what she was doing, but at least I got her to explain the hardware she was using and how she was exploiting it!

  As I recall, she was married to Jack Schwartz at Courant Institute of NYU and as in

  Nelson Dunford and Jacob T. Schwartz, Linear Operators.

• by sitkack on 8/6/20, 12:58 AM

  :(

  Optimizing Compilers for Parallel Computers, lecture by Frances E. Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv-wXcUxrmE

  Frances Allen, 2006, ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture, "Compiling for Performance: A Personal Tour" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU-MjCws4

• by nthomas on 8/6/20, 3:49 PM

  Fran gave a talk when I interned at TJ Watson one summer. Her stories of the early days of compilers were beyond fascinating and made it clear how much we all now were just building on ideas they established decades ago.

  Later, my wife was the first to receive the IBM PhD fellowship established in Fran's honor. Fran awarded it to her at a conference (Grace Hopper I think) and of course was gracious, offering to help as your career moved forward. Thankful for that investment in our future.

• by hardwaregeek on 8/6/20, 1:45 AM

  I'd recommend reading her interview in Coders At Work. I never realized that compilers were already a flourishing field by the time C came around, and that C actually ended up having some negative effects in compiler dev.

• by DoreenMichele on 8/6/20, 1:11 AM

  First female IBM fellow.

  First female winner of the Turing Award.

  Lots of other notable stuff.

  Sadly, this is the first I've heard of her. Hopefully all that means is I'm not a real programmer.

  Edit: To be clear, I really meant "I hope other people here are familiar with her work, even though I am not because I'm not a real programmer." I'm happy to see that some people are, in fact, familiar with her and her work.

• by tombert on 8/6/20, 12:26 PM

  This is absolutely worthy of a black bar.

  I read one of Frances’ papers on compiler optimization, and while some of it went over my head, it was still valuable information; the world is a sadder place without her.

• by vaxman on 8/8/20, 2:29 AM

  My dad should have married her. Same story except Spartans instead of Wolverines and he went into Defense instead of IBM, and he’s older and still rockin’ Siri on his AppleWatch.

• by jolux on 8/6/20, 1:17 PM

  Wish we could get the black bar up.

• by finphil on 8/9/20, 4:55 PM

  RIP

• by relaunched on 8/6/20, 1:09 AM

  I'd love to see a black banner / bar in her honor.

• by chaostheory on 8/6/20, 6:16 PM

  Going on a tangent, I think most of us missed Bill English's passing a few days ago since I think because people only noticed it on the weekend when there are less HN users active.

• by filereaper on 8/6/20, 2:28 AM

  @dang can we get a black bar in her honor?

• by jzig on 8/6/20, 6:34 PM

  Why doesn't the black bar link to the related submission?

• by brian_herman__ on 8/6/20, 7:53 PM

  I'm glad we got a black bar for her.

• by abegnoche on 8/6/20, 2:18 PM

  My brain read the title as "France Had Aliens" which I was really curious to read. Thanks brain.