computer code compilers, passed away on August 4 from complications of Alzheimer's disease, which happened to be her 88th birthday. Allen is the first female winner in Turing Award history and the first female academician of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
Francis Allen (1932-2020)
"strayed into" IBM
to repay the graduate student loan. The day after Allen died, the IBM Research Institute wrote a special tribute. Dean Dario Gil (Dario Gil) said that Allen will be remembered as a pioneer in the field of computing, and she has made pioneering contributions in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen worked at IBM for 45 years and retired in 2002.
In 1932, Allen was born into an ordinary family at , , New York, USA. Her father is a farmer and her mother is a primary school teacher. She is the eldest of the six children in the family.
In 1954, she graduated from the State University of New York at Albany with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and entered a local middle school to teach. Because the work unit required her higher degree certification, Alan entered the University of Michigan two years later and received a master's degree in mathematics in 1957.
At that time, IBM came to the University of Michigan to do campus recruitment, and Allen decided to join the company as a programmer to repay the loan owed by graduate school. She originally planned to leave IBM after paying off her debts, but she stayed there for nearly half a century.
stimulated interest in compilation and won IBM's highest award
Initially, Allen taught the basics of FORTRAN language to new employees at IBM. Today, FORTRAN is already one of the oldest computer languages, but at the time it was a new high-level programming language introduced by IBM. This was also the beginning of her career in high-performance computing compilers.
Following this project, in the early 1960s, Allen began working on the Stretch-Harvest machine project, which was designed to deal with the communication password cracking and intelligence collection work of the National Security Agency (NSA). She helped create code compilers and programming languages.
Allen helped found the code compiler
after completing the NSA project, Allen participated in IBM's advanced computing system project. From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, she led a research group at IBM to study the new concept of parallel computing, which has been widely used in personal computers.
Allen also helped develop software for IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer project. She has published many papers on program optimization and control flow analysis. In 1989, she became the first female of the "IBM Academician". The IBM academician is the highest honor for the company's technical staff. When
was interviewed by the media in 2002, Allen said that initially people had a lot of doubts about the FORTRAN language. How it can effectively make computer programming easier and more efficient is a major focus of her career.
"There is huge resistance," Allen said. "Sceptics believe that any higher-level language cannot do a good job like assembly language." But this work inspired her interest in compilation, because FORTRAN The organization method has a direct inheritance with modern compilers.
"She broke the glass ceiling"
IBM said that Allen is a strong supporter of guiding other women to program, and half of IBM's experimental compiler team is made up of women. She was inducted into the International Women in Science and Technology Hall of Fame and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Women in Computer Association.
In 2006, due to "making pioneering contributions in the theoretical and practical fields of optimizing compiler technology, laying the foundation for modern optimizing compiler and automatic parallel execution technology", Allen became the first woman to receive the Turing Award since its establishment in 1966 Winner. The Turing Prize is hailed as the "Nobel Prize in Computer Science." Since her award, two other women have also won the award.
Allen won the Turing Award in 2006.
"She broke the glass ceiling," Allen's colleague Mark Wegman (Mark Wegman) said. "At the time, no one even thought that someone like her could achieve such a high level. Achievement."
In terms of personal life, Alan and JiComputer scientist Jacob Schwartz (Jacob Schwartz) had a marriage. Schwartz once came to IBM as a visiting scholar and cooperated with Allen and scientist John Cocke. The three people did a lot of pioneering work in compiler optimization and software tools.
Allen later became Schwartz's second wife. The two married in 1972, but the marriage ended in Lao Yanfei.
Southern Reporter Shi Minglei
