Most Influential PLDI Paper Award

Presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the PLDI held 10 years prior to the award year. The award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

Selection Committee

The award given in year N is for the most influential paper presented at the conference held in year N-10. The selection committee consists of the following members:

  • the current SIGPLAN Chair, ex officio,
  • a member of the SIGPLAN EC appointed as committee Chair by the SIGPLAN Chair,
  • the General Chair and Program Chair for PLDI N-10,
  • the General Chair and Program Chair for PLDI N-1, and
  • a member of the SIGPLAN EC appointed by the committee Chair.

The SIGPLAN Chair shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.

2012: Cormac Flanagan, K. Rustan M. Leino, Mark Lillibridge, Greg Nelson, James B. Saxe, Raymie Stata

(for 2002) Extended Static Checking for Java

Citation

This paper marks a turning point in the field of static checking, describing pragmatic design decisions that promote practicality over completeness. Pioneered in ESC/Modula-3, techniques from ESC/Java are now widely used in various forms in Microsoft’s development tools, notably as part of Code Contracts which ships with VisualStudio. Recent innovations strongly influenced by ESC/Java include refinement types for Haskell, and verification of Eiffel programs.

2011: Thomas Ball, Rupak Majumdar, Todd Millstein, Sriram K. Rajamani

(for 2001) Automatic predicate abstraction of C programs

Citation

The paper, "Automatic Predicate Abstraction of C Programs" by Thomas Ball, Rupak Majumdar, Todd D. Millstein, and Sriram K. Rajamani presented the underlying predicate abstraction technology of the SLAM project for checking that software satisfies critical behavioral properties of the interfaces it uses and to aid software engineers in designing interfaces and software that ensure reliable and correct execution. The technology is now part of Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier in the Windows Driver Development Kit. This is one of the earliest examples of automation of software verification on a large scale and the basis for numerous efforts to expand the domains that can be verified."

2010: Vasanth Bala, Evelyn Duesterwald, Sanjeev Banerji

(for 2000) Dynamo: A Transparent Dynamic Optimization System,

Citation

"Dynamo pioneered the technique of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing binary code on-the-fly while the program executes, without relying on any program modifications, compiler hints, profile data from prior runs, or special purpose hardware. Contrary to intuition, one could use Dynamo to substantially improve the performance of a binary's execution, even when it was generated by a state-of-the-art optimizing compiler.

2009: Matteo Frigo

(for 1999) A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler,

Citation

"The 1999 PLDI paper “A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler” by Matteo Frigo describes the implementation of genfft, a special-purpose compiler that produces the performance critical code for a library, called FFTW (the “Fastest Fourier Transform in the West”), that computes the discrete Fourier transform. FFTW is the predominant open fast Fourier transform package available today, as it has been since its introduction a decade ago.

2008: Matteo Frigo, Charles E. Leiserson, and Keith H. Randall

(for 1998) The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language

Citation

"The 1998 PLDI paper "Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language" by Matteo Frigo, Charles E. Leiserson, and Keith H. Randall introduced an efficient form of thread-local deques to control scheduling of multithreaded programs.

Past Recipients of the Influential PLDI Paper Award

2007 (for 1997): Exploiting Hardware Performance Counters with Flow and Context Sensitive Profiling, Glenn Ammons, Thomas Ball, and James R. Larus

2006 (for 1996): TIL: A Type-Directed Optimizing Compiler for ML, David Tarditi, Greg Morrisett, Perry Cheng, Christopher Stone, Robert Harper, and Peter Lee

2005 (for 1995): Selective Specialization for Object-Oriented Languages, Jeffrey Dean, Craig Chambers, and David Grove

2004 (for 1994): ATOM: a system for building customized program analysis tools, Amitabh Srivastava and Alan Eustace

2003 (for 1993): Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection, Hans Boehm

2002 (for 1992): Lazy Code Motion, Jens Knoop, Oliver Rüthing, Bernhard Steffen.

2001 (for 1991): A data locality optimizing algorithm, Michael E. Wolf and Monica S. Lam.

2000 (for 1990): Profile guided code positioning, Karl Pettis and Robert C. Hansen.