Vishkin Receives 2026 IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award

Uzi Vishkin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), has received the 2026 IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award.

Presented annually to honor significant contributions in parallel computing, the award commemorates Charles Babbage, an English polymath who helped originate the concept of a programmable computer. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage—together with Ada Lovelace—is often called the “father of the computer” for his pioneering work on mechanical computation.

Vishkin is widely regarded as a pioneer in parallel computing. He helped found the parallel random-access machine (PRAM) algorithmic theory—a framework that has become a standard for designing and analyzing parallel algorithms—and contributed many of its foundational parallel algorithms. The IEEE award recognizes him for his “seminal contributions to the theory of PRAM computing and for inventing numerous work-efficient parallel algorithms.”

Keshav Pingali, chair of the award subcommittee and a 2023 Babbage award recipient himself, says Vishkin was an obvious choice.

“Uzi is an accomplished and inspirational figure across many areas of parallel computing, from algorithms and computational models to architectures,” says Pingali, the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of computer science. “This was an easy decision for my committee.”

Hironori Washizaki, IEEE Computer Society 2025 President, echoed these thoughts.

“Uzi Vishkin is an established force in parallel computing whose fundamental contributions have profoundly shaped the field,” says Washizaki, a professor and associate dean of the Research Promotion Division at Waseda University in Tokyo. “His seminal work includes foundational techniques such as interleaving pointer doubling with contraction; advancing deterministic approaches to parallel contraction; and introducing the influential concept of cascading.”

Vishkin’s research spans parallel computing and parallel computer architecture. In 1997, he and his team introduced the XMT (Explicit Multi-Threading) desktop supercomputer concept, later known as PRAM-On-Chip, which applied parallel algorithmic theory to both hardware and software design. By 2007, the XMT prototype already featured 64 parallel processors, enabling more accessible and cost-effective programming for software developers.

In 2005, Vishkin pioneered the integration of parallel processing accelerators into central processing units (CPUs), laying the groundwork for the widespread adoption of CPUs coupled with integrated GPUs (iGPUs), now implemented in over a billion devices such as desktops and laptops, worldwide.

His contributions have earned international recognition. Last year, he was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and in August, he received the 2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) Parallel Computing Award. He is also a Fellow of the ACM.

“ACM and IEEE are the two broad professional organizations covering computer science and engineering,” Vishkin says. “I am deeply honored to have received both their most relevant career awards for my work—the ACM SPAA Parallel Computing Award and the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award.”

The Charles Babbage Award will be presented during the IEEE-CS International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, held May 25–29, 2026 in New Orleans.

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld, UMIACS communications group

Published December 9, 2025