Sarita V. Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span the system stack, including hardware, programming languages, operating systems, and applications. Her current research is on generalizable and scalable specialization for domain-specific systems, with a focus on systems for extended reality or XR (including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality). She chairs the ILLIXR consortium, established to democratize XR systems research, development, and benchmarking.
She co-developed the memory consistency models for the C++ and Java programming languages, which are based on her early work on data-race-free (DRF) models. Recently, her group released ILLIXR (Illinois Extended Reality testbed), the first fully open source extended reality system. She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems (she co-developed the Spandex coherence framework, based on her previous work on DeNovo, for efficient heterogeneous coherence and showed the superiority of DRF even with heterogeneity); hardware reliability (she co-developed software-driven approaches for hardware reliability in the SWAT project and the concept of lifetime reliability aware architectures and dynamic reliability management in the RAMP project); power management (she led the design of GRACE, one of the first systems to implement cross-layer energy management); exploiting instruction-level parallelism (ILP) for memory system performance (she co-authored some of the first papers on exploiting ILP for memory level parallelism); and evaluation techniques for shared-memory multiprocessors with ILP processors (she led the development of the RSIM architecture simulator).
She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award, the Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision in innovation award, the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a UIUC University Scholar recognition. She also received the University of Illinois campus award for excellence in graduate student mentoring and has appeared numerous times on the Illinois campus list of excellent teachers.
Her recent and current notable service includes ACM SIGARCH (chair from 2015-19), the DARPA/ISAT study group, the ACM Council, and the Computing Research Association (CRA). As ACM SIGARCH chair, she co-founded the CARES movement, winner of the CRA distinguished service award, to address discrimination and harassment in Computer Science research events. She co-founded and chairs CS@Illinois CARES, the first of its kind CARES committee in a CS department dedicated to upholding the CS values and code of conduct across the department.
She received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1993 and 1989 respectively, and the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay in 1987. Before joining Illinois, she was on the faculty at Rice University from 1993 to 1999.