To: Turing Award Committee

It is my pleasure to give my very strongest support to Ken Kennedy's
nomination for the ACM Turing award. The breadth and depth of Ken's
contributions to both research and community service make his case
exceptionally compelling.

Moshe Vardi has eloquently described Ken's credentials in his nomination
and I will not repeat this. I can endorse all he says and expand a
little on his work which most directly impacted me. I first met Ken in
1987 at a summer conference in Greece where we began conversations that
resulted he me joining his CRPC proposal to "make parallel computing a
more effective useable technology". As Moshe explains only Ken's calm
thoughtful leaderful could have made this succesful and a model for such
large collaborative efforts. Not only myself but many students and young
faculty at Syracuse University benefited from the opportunity CRPC gave
for us to collaboratively work with so many fine scientists. Ken was
able to maintain a team of the highest quality -- a very non trivial
task given the difficult social and political issues that are inevitable
in such a large visible effort. We developed new technology (such as
Fortran D/HPF and ADIFOR), new processes for our community (such as MPI
and HPF Forums). Moreover the exceptional record of CRPC in outreach was
due to Ken's insistence that this must be done -- with typical good
taste, he implemented his vision by allowing great scientists like
Richard Tapia to "do their thing". These remarkable leadership efforts
were accomplished even as he maintained his vital research group on new
approaches to compiler based parallelism -- the area where my group
worked with him on HPF.

Ken's recent community service on PITAC has affected many of us through
its success. This had and will have enormous impact on the national
research community.NSF has its ITR program but my current effort --
research in community grids -- also owes its existence to the PITAC
report. In my case it created an environment where Indiana University
and the Lilly Foundation agreed to start an information technology
initiative. In another personal experience, I have been helping the
Indian Tribal colleges formulate an information technology policy --
another initiative born from the PITAC report. More generally ITR and
associated programs are changing the approach to Science -- encouraging
even diehard physicists to adopt modern information technology and
creating a more collaborative environment involving researchers,
government and the general public.

Geoffrey Fox
Professor of Computer Science, Informatics and Physics
Indiana University