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.

Recipients:

2009 (for 1999): A Fast Fourier Transform Compiler, Matteo Frigo

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. genfft demonstrated the power of domain-specific compilation—FFTW achieves the best or close to best performance on most machines, which is remarkable for a single package. By encapsulating expert knowledge from the FFT algorithm domain and the compiler domain, genfft and FFTW provide a tremendous service to the scientific and technical community by making highly efficient FFTs available to everyone on any machine. As well as being the fastest FFT in the West, FFTW may be the last FFT in the West as the quality of this package and the maturity of the field may mean that it will never be superseded, at least for computer architectures similar to past and current ones."

2008 (for 1998): The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language, Matteo Frigo, Charles E. Leiserson, and Keith H. Randall

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. This innovation not only opened the way to faster and simpler runtimes for fine-grained parallelism, but also provided a basis for simpler parallel recursive programming techniques that elegantly extend those of sequential programming. The stack-like side of a deque acts just like a standard procedure stack, while the queue side enables breadth-first work-stealing by other threads. The work-stealing techniques introduced in this paper are beginning to influence common practice, such as the Intel Threading Building Blocks project, an upcoming standardized fork-join framework for Java, and a variety of projects at Microsoft."

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.

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,
• 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 PLDI Chair.

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