HPCwire: Rice Computing Pioneer Ken Kennedy Dead at 61

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February 09, 2007

Rice Computing Pioneer Ken Kennedy Dead at 61

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HOUSTON, February 7, 2007 -- Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing, died February 7 at a Houston hospital after a long battle with cancer. He was 61.

"Rice has lost one of its great intellectual leaders and a great human being," Rice President David Leebron said. "Ken Kennedy early on realized the power of computers to address real problems that confront people and the Earth. His most recent contributions included using bioanalysis to help work on health issues like cancer. Ken leaves a great legacy for Rice and for mankind. He will be missed."

In a 36-year career, Kennedy, a member of the elite National Academy of Engineering, helped Rice stake a claim as one of the nation's leading academic centers for computational research and education. He founded Rice's Department of Computer Science in 1984, its cross-disciplinary Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) in 1987, its Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) in 1989, and its Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft) in 2000.

"Ken was incredibly dedicated to Rice and dedicated his career to developing computing research at Rice," said CITI Director Moshe Vardi. "If Rice is famous today for its computing research, it is due to Ken Kennedy."

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ranked Rice's computer engineering program No. 2 in the nation based on a scholarly productivity analysis by researchers at the State University of New York.

"Ken was a beloved and incredibly valuable faculty member in every dimension mentoring, strategic vision, education and research," said Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering. "He was a pillar for the scholarly community of computational sciences and engineering. This is a profound global loss, the true magnitude of which won't be fully realized for some time."

Though dedicated to Rice, Kennedy earned a worldwide reputation for leadership. In 1997, he was tapped to co-chair the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), a congressionally mandated committee charged with advising the president, Congress and other federal agencies on advanced information technology. The panel's 1999 report urged U.S. leaders to increase spending for computing research by more than $1 billion, and it served as a catalyst for increased IT research support from numerous federal agencies.

"At Rice I had experienced, firsthand, Ken's legendary vision, organization and personal skills, and his dogged determination, all of which enabled him to do what other people could not," said Rice physicist Neal Lane, who, during Kennedy's PITAC tenure, served first as National Science Foundation (NSF) director and later as White House science adviser. "In Washington, I became aware of the enormous respect that his colleagues around the world and everyone he worked with had for his abilities, his professional accomplishments and his humanity."

Kennedy's connection to Rice ran deep and began when he was an undergraduate mathematics major. "Like most people who have been to Rice, I have developed a strong attachment for it," he said in a 1986 interview. "My father was in the military, and we moved 16 times by the time I graduated from high school. Rice was the first place at which I had spent more than three years."

Kennedy graduated summa cum laude in 1967 and returned just four years later after earning one of the first doctorates in computer science awarded by New York University.

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