Ken Kennedy Honored with Graduate Fellowship Endowed by Cray Inc.

By Jade Boyd

Mackale Joyner, one of Ken Kennedy’s former doctoral students, has been selected as the first recipient of the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship fund, established with a $150,000 gift from global supercomputer leader Cray Inc., will provide support to graduate students, with preference given to those involved in high-performance computing (HPC).

Kennedy, who died last year after a long battle with cancer, was one of the world’s foremost HPC experts and founded both Rice’s nationally ranked computer science program and the cross-disciplinary Computer and Information Technology Institute, which recently was renamed the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology in his honor. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Rice in 1967 and returned to join the university’s faculty four years later.

Kennedy earned a worldwide reputation for leadership in computation and served on Cray’s board of directors from 1989 until his death. He also served as director for a number of focal HPC organizations and entities, including the Center for Research on Parallel Computation and the Virtual Grid Application Development Software Project, both of which were supported by the National Science Foundation.

Joyner, who earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Rice, said Kennedy, who was his Ph.D. adviser from 2002 until the time of his death, had a profound influence on his life.
“He was the one who first suggested I go to graduate school, and I don’t think I’d be earning a Ph.D. and pursuing an academic career if it wasn’t for him,” Joyner said. “He spoke with me as I was turning in the final in his senior-level compiler class. At that point, I had a job offer, and I had never thought about going to graduate school. He talked to me about what he did, the freedom that he had in academia, and he told me I could come to work for him.”