Contributor

George K. Thiruvathukal is Full Professor of Computer Science and the Department Chairperson at Loyola University Chicago. He is also Visiting Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the Leadership Computing Facility. He received a Ph.D. (1995) and MS (1990) in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology and a BA (1988) in Computer Science and Physics with a Mathematics Minor from Lewis University in Romeoville, IL.

As a Computer Science major at Lewis University, he received the department’s top graduating student award in the College of Arts and Sciences; as a Physics major at the same university, he was inducted into the Sigma Pi Sigma Physics National honor society. During the summer of his junior year, he worked with Philip J. Hatcher at the University of New Hampshire on a NSF-funded summer REU program focused on compiler construction for data-parallel languages on general-purpose MIMD architectures, where he really learned C and Unix systems programming and continues to teach on these topics to this day in courses such as COMP 141, 310-410, and 339-439 (among others). The resulting tools led to the development of a portable Data Parallel C dialect inspired by the C* Language used to program the Connection Machine. The ideas of Data Parallel C live on in Data Parallel C++, an Intel effort where Dr. Thiruvathukal is developing curricular modules to bring this promising new technology to new audiences.