In 1990, Kennedy was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering for his work in parallel processing. This September, he was invited to serve as an expert on the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. The road to Kennedy's role in parallel computing lay through what are known as compilers, programs that translate other programs. N.Y. There he exchanged ideas with David Kuck of the University of Illinois. The two men led competing groups in making a compiler that would use ordinary computer language to run a variety of vector machines.
Most current supercomputers are vector machines, so called because they use vector processors.
Vector processors bring order to a long problem by sorting out similar mathematical operations. The multiplications are done first, then the division, and so on, enabling the machine to compute more quickly. Kennedy compares vectors to a squad of British infantry with ranks of soldiers firing in sequence. While one group is reloading, another is shooting. It's a simple idea, but the big problem is how to tell the processors what to do in a way that's fast and easy.