Congratulations to Prof. Vivek Sarkar, E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, who is a co-recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for 2012 for his contributions to the Jikes Research Virtual Machine.  This award recognizes the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools.

Jikes Research Virtual Machine (RVM) is unique as a high-performance open-source virtual machine for the Java programming language that is itself written in Java.  The impact of Jikes RVM is manifest in its high degree of scientific innovation and its widespread use as an open source research infrastructure.  This is witnessed by more than 200 papers, at least 40 dissertations, close to 25 courses, and research at almost 100 universities, that are based on the Jikes RVM.  The JIkes RVM project was started as the Jalapeno project at IBM Research in November 1997.  From 1998 to 2000, Prof. Sarkar was manager of the Dynamic Optimization group, which was responsible for the dynamic optimizing compiler and adaptive optimization system in Jalapeno. After becoming Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research in 2000, Sarkar led the team that evolved the Jalapeno research project into the Jikes RVM open-source release in 2001.

 

To read the official citation, click here.