Thora Manuel News

Ken Kennedy. Ken waged a valiant fight against cancer, with courage, grace and good humor. My heart goes out to Ken’s wife Carol, who was the love of his life.
Ken made deep and seminal contributions to high performance computing, automatic parallelization and high-level languages. His work on Fortran D and High-Performance Fortran (HPF) was far ahead of its time. By applying advanced parallelization techniques to data parallel languages, HPF supported a succinct and powerful data parallel metaphor on distributed memory (message passing) systems.
In addition to his research and the generations of students, Ken was the co-chair of the President’s IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) and the driving force behind PiTAC’s 1999 report, Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future. This report was the genesis of the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program and a international recognition that computing was a critical enabler of economic competitiveness.
On a more personal note, Ken was my colleague, my collaborator and my friend. We were reserach partners on a host of projects, beginning with integrated performance analysis and optimization for Fortran D in the early 1990s and continuing through the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI) and the GrADS and VGrADS projects.
When the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held an investiture ceremony when I was named a Gutgsell Professor, there was only one person I wanted to speak at the ceremony — Ken Kennedy.
I miss my friend. Computing is the less today for his passing.

Addendum
The New York Times and the Rice University announcements describe Ken’s many accomplishments in detail.

I now have 23 daylily seedlings. I’ve had to transplant some of them already, but more keep sprouting all the time. I reused a large glass vase that had tulips planted in it, and planted some daylily seedlings there to replace them.

Most of My Daylily Seedlings

Daylily Transplants in a Large Glass Vase

I did some more planting on the weekend, sunflowers and petunias. I decided on all different colours of sunflowers, including pink and red. And some of the petunias are special double hybrid ones, which were expensive (for seeds), so I hope they sprout.

Sunflower and Petunia Seeds

The sunflowers are just starting to sprout. It’s no wonder I’m so frustrated with the daylilies taking so long when there are other seeds that sprout this quickly. My guess with the sunflower seeds would be that, since they are so delicious for animals and birds to eat, they would have to sprout fast or else there would never be any plants for the next year. (I should know this. I am always having to clear the space under the bird feeder of sunflower sprouts in the summer.)

Sunflower Sprout (The Little White Dot)

My tomato seedlings are getting their second (and in some cases third) set of leaves, and they actually smell like tomato plants.

Our new cat is fascinated by the “greenhouse” area I have set up, and there have been a few near-accidents when she is around. But she is a good cat, and we love her. How could we not? She is very beautiful.

Photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be used without attribution.

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