In Memoriam - Fran Allen
Hi: With great sadness I pass on this announcement from today’s issue of ACM Tech News:
Frances E. Allen, First Female Recipient of ACM A.M. Turing Award, Dies at 88 IBM Research Blog August 5, 2020
Frances Allen, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to be awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, has died at 88. A pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Allen’s achievements in inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to straddle the leading edge of compiler research. She served as IBM’s language liaison with the U.S. National Security Agency, helping to design and construct the high-level Alpha code-breaking language, which could generate new alphabets beyond system-defined alphabets. Allen designed and built the machine-independent, language-independent optimizing component of the Experimental Compiler for IBM's Advanced Computing System. An ACM Fellow, Allen also was a fellow of IEEE and of the Computer History Museum, was inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
I have happy memories of working alongside, and being highly impressed by, Fran Allen first at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and then with the ACS Project in California, in the mid-1960s. Many years later, as a member of the Alan Turing Award Committee, I had the privilege of being involved with her receiving the Alan Turing Award. Her work with John Cocke at Yorktown Heights on optimising compilers was truly ground-breaking, an important early stage of a brilliant 45-year career at IBM, very appropriately marked by her Turing Award. Let me encourage everyone who is not familiar with it to read the ACM Turing Award page about her - it is at https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm Kind regards Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html
Thank you for this important news. The URL for that story is https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/remembering-frances-allen/ She was also named a Computer History Museum Fellow in 2000: https://computerhistory.org/profile/frances-allen/ and she was included in the video used at the start of many CHM events until fairly recently. Brian Berg On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 12:47 PM Brian Randell <brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi:
With great sadness I pass on this announcement from today’s issue of ACM Tech News:
Frances E. Allen, First Female Recipient of ACM A.M. Turing Award, Dies at 88 IBM Research Blog August 5, 2020
Frances Allen, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to be awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, has died at 88. A pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Allen’s achievements in inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to straddle the leading edge of compiler research. She served as IBM’s language liaison with the U.S. National Security Agency, helping to design and construct the high-level Alpha code-breaking language, which could generate new alphabets beyond system-defined alphabets. Allen designed and built the machine-independent, language-independent optimizing component of the Experimental Compiler for IBM's Advanced Computing System. An ACM Fellow, Allen also was a fellow of IEEE and of the Computer History Museum, was inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
I have happy memories of working alongside, and being highly impressed by, Fran Allen first at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and then with the ACS Project in California, in the mid-1960s. Many years later, as a member of the Alan Turing Award Committee, I had the privilege of being involved with her receiving the Alan Turing Award. Her work with John Cocke at Yorktown Heights on optimising compilers was truly ground-breaking, an important early stage of a brilliant 45-year career at IBM, very appropriately marked by her Turing Award.
Let me encourage everyone who is not familiar with it to read the ACM Turing Award page about her - it is at https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm
Kind regards
Brian Randell
—
School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html
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I think that this story is correct, but I may have a faulty memory. Anyway, let me share a story that doesn’t seem to be included anywhere in Fran Allen’s biography. Some time after I went to work for IBM in 1960, I believe that Fran was working for IBM in a small NY City research group and I was working in White Plains in the Data Processing Division for Bob Bemer. I was working on various business technical applications and somehow I was connected to Fran to ask her to work on the problem of how to cut the cloth for men’s suits so as to have the least waste material for different men’s sizes. I’ve forgotten who the original client was, but it was a major suit maker in the New York City area. I don’t remember what mathematical techniques she used, but the solution was quite elegant, was useful to the client, and had far broader use for other cloth cutting applications. She was a pleasure to work with, and really pushed us to accurately define the problem for her. Burt Grad From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> On Behalf Of Brian Berg Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2020 11:56 AM To: SIGCIS Listserver <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memoriam - Fran Allen Thank you for this important news. The URL for that story is https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/remembering-frances-allen/ She was also named a Computer History Museum Fellow in 2000: https://computerhistory.org/profile/frances-allen/ and she was included in the video used at the start of many CHM events until fairly recently. Brian Berg On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 12:47 PM Brian Randell <brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk <mailto:brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk> > wrote: Hi: With great sadness I pass on this announcement from today’s issue of ACM Tech News:
Frances E. Allen, First Female Recipient of ACM A.M. Turing Award, Dies at 88 IBM Research Blog August 5, 2020
Frances Allen, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to be awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, has died at 88. A pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Allen’s achievements in inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to straddle the leading edge of compiler research. She served as IBM’s language liaison with the U.S. National Security Agency, helping to design and construct the high-level Alpha code-breaking language, which could generate new alphabets beyond system-defined alphabets. Allen designed and built the machine-independent, language-independent optimizing component of the Experimental Compiler for IBM's Advanced Computing System. An ACM Fellow, Allen also was a fellow of IEEE and of the Computer History Museum, was inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
I have happy memories of working alongside, and being highly impressed by, Fran Allen first at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and then with the ACS Project in California, in the mid-1960s. Many years later, as a member of the Alan Turing Award Committee, I had the privilege of being involved with her receiving the Alan Turing Award. Her work with John Cocke at Yorktown Heights on optimising compilers was truly ground-breaking, an important early stage of a brilliant 45-year career at IBM, very appropriately marked by her Turing Award. Let me encourage everyone who is not familiar with it to read the ACM Turing Award page about her - it is at https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm Kind regards Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk <mailto:Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk> PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://sigcis.org> , the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
The obituary mentions her work on Alpha for the NSA (possibly in conjunction with development of the IBM 7950?). Are any details of Alpha available? From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of burtgrad@aol.com Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2020 1:04 PM To: 'Brian Berg'; 'SIGCIS Listserver' Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memoriam - Fran Allen I think that this story is correct, but I may have a faulty memory. Anyway, let me share a story that doesn’t seem to be included anywhere in Fran Allen’s biography. Some time after I went to work for IBM in 1960, I believe that Fran was working for IBM in a small NY City research group and I was working in White Plains in the Data Processing Division for Bob Bemer. I was working on various business technical applications and somehow I was connected to Fran to ask her to work on the problem of how to cut the cloth for men’s suits so as to have the least waste material for different men’s sizes. I’ve forgotten who the original client was, but it was a major suit maker in the New York City area. I don’t remember what mathematical techniques she used, but the solution was quite elegant, was useful to the client, and had far broader use for other cloth cutting applications. She was a pleasure to work with, and really pushed us to accurately define the problem for her. Burt Grad From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> On Behalf Of Brian Berg Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2020 11:56 AM To: SIGCIS Listserver <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memoriam - Fran Allen Thank you for this important news. The URL for that story is https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/remembering-frances-allen/ She was also named a Computer History Museum Fellow in 2000: https://computerhistory.org/profile/frances-allen/ and she was included in the video used at the start of many CHM events until fairly recently. Brian Berg On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 12:47 PM Brian Randell <brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote: Hi: With great sadness I pass on this announcement from today’s issue of ACM Tech News:
Frances E. Allen, First Female Recipient of ACM A.M. Turing Award, Dies at 88 IBM Research Blog August 5, 2020
Frances Allen, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to be awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, has died at 88. A pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Allen’s achievements in inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to straddle the leading edge of compiler research. She served as IBM’s language liaison with the U.S. National Security Agency, helping to design and construct the high-level Alpha code-breaking language, which could generate new alphabets beyond system-defined alphabets. Allen designed and built the machine-independent, language-independent optimizing component of the Experimental Compiler for IBM's Advanced Computing System. An ACM Fellow, Allen also was a fellow of IEEE and of the Computer History Museum, was inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.
I have happy memories of working alongside, and being highly impressed by, Fran Allen first at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and then with the ACS Project in California, in the mid-1960s. Many years later, as a member of the Alan Turing Award Committee, I had the privilege of being involved with her receiving the Alan Turing Award. Her work with John Cocke at Yorktown Heights on optimising compilers was truly ground-breaking, an important early stage of a brilliant 45-year career at IBM, very appropriately marked by her Turing Award. Let me encourage everyone who is not familiar with it to read the ACM Turing Award page about her - it is at https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm Kind regards Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
On Aug 6, 2020, at 1:16 PM, Ken Strauss <ken.strauss@sympatico.ca> wrote:
The obituary mentions her work on Alpha for the NSA (possibly in conjunction with development of the IBM 7950?). Are any details of Alpha available?
Hi, Ken. Alpha was a language on the IBM 7950 (Harvest) for the NSA’s use in writing cryptanalysis applications. Some links: - The Wikipedia article on Harvest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest gives a little context. - A declassified 1964 paper by Snyder, "History of NSA [National Security Agency] General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers” has a little about Alpha (https://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-HGPEDC_1964.pdf) - It looks like Allen gave a talk at the Computer History Museum in 2000, but the page about it is just publicity for it: https://computerhistory.org/events/stretchharvest-compiler/ Not a lot that’s easy to get to, however. Best, Win
Thanks. Unfortunately those documents are largely non-technical. It would be great to find the "NSA-produced ALPHA Language Technical Report that was issued in June 1960" mentioned in your second link.
-----Original Message----- From: Win Treese [mailto:treese@acm.org] Sent: Monday, August 10, 2020 9:09 PM To: Ken Strauss Cc: SIGCIS Listserver Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memoriam - Fran Allen
On Aug 6, 2020, at 1:16 PM, Ken Strauss <ken.strauss@sympatico.ca> wrote:
The obituary mentions her work on Alpha for the NSA (possibly in conjunction with development of the IBM 7950?). Are any details of Alpha available?
Hi, Ken.
Alpha was a language on the IBM 7950 (Harvest) for the NSA's use in writing cryptanalysis applications.
Some links:
- The Wikipedia article on Harvest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest gives a little context.
- A declassified 1964 paper by Snyder, "History of NSA [National Security Agency] General-Purpose Electronic Digital Computers" has a little about Alpha (https://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-HGPEDC_1964.pdf)
- It looks like Allen gave a talk at the Computer History Museum in 2000, but the page about it is just publicity for it: https://computerhistory.org/events/stretchharvest-compiler/
Not a lot that's easy to get to, however.
Best,
Win
participants (5)
-
Brian Berg -
Brian Randell -
burtgrad＠aol.com -
Ken Strauss -
Win Treese