Sarita V. Adve

Adve's contributions to designing and formally specifying memory consistency models has had profound, real-world impact on programmability and productivity in computing. Memory consistency has been one of the most challenging and contentious areas in concurrent hardware and software specification. She co-developed the memory consistency models for the Java and C++ programming languages based on her early work on data-race-free (DRF) models. Her research in this area, spanning almost 20 years, is the foundation for the convergence of mainstream languages embracing a largely common model and hardware vendors designing hardware that is compatible with those language models. It is quite safe to say that without the clear memory ordering rules for Java and C++, the programmability and productivity of many computing systems would have been greatly impeded.