A pioneer who paved the way for the era of parallel and distributed processing

Professor Akinori Yonezawa
(Department of Computer Science)

Professor Yonezawa is a pioneer who promoted basic research and practical implementation of new software systems centered on the keywords “concurrent/parallel” and “distributed.” He opened the door to apply the “concurrent object” computation model to software systems for parallel/distributed computers, supercomputers, and Internet. “Concurrent Objects” are software modules which are used to compose software systems as well as application software running on multiple/parallel computers. Concurrent object-oriented technology is broadly used even for natural language processing and structural analysis of genes, and it is an important technology to open up information society.

In early 1970' s when Professor Yonezawa was doing research in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and programming languages at MIT, the idea flashed in his mind that “computer price will go down in 10 years and a vast number of computers will be used in an interconnected manner. When it becomes a reality, a methodology to make full use of them will be necessary.” In a time when no one expected to connect and use multiple computers, he foresaw that concurrent and distributed processing methodologies would play a major role in computing in the upcoming era, and advocated his original computational concept called “Concurrent Objects” as first in the world.

This technology spread broadly, For example, University of Illinois in US developed the leading application for supercomputers called NAMD (molecular dynamics simulator) using the concurrent object-oriented language system Charm++ that is used to find antibodies of new viruses. Applications written in Charm++ accounts for 20% of computational resources held by two major supercomputer centers in US.

Professor Yonezawa was the first Asian researcher to receive the internationally prestigious “Dahl-Nygaard Prize”, in 2008, in recognition of his leadership in pioneering theories and applications, and received the Medal with Purple Ribbon from the emperor of Japan for his academic contribution in November, 2009.