The Department of Computer Sciences received the 2009 Software System Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for their work on a new database system.
The Software System Award is awarded for the development of software systems that have had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and/or commercial acceptance.
Emeritus Professor David DeWitt and Professor Jeffrey Naughton, along with former students Robert Gerber, Murali Krishna, Donovan A. Schneider, Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Goetz Graefe, Michael Heytens, Hui-I Hsiao and Anoop Sharma, developed the Gamma Parallel Database System. This was the first parallel database management system to publish experimental results demonstrating the ability to run the same query with the same performance on larger data sets by simply adding hardware nodes. The announcement is available online.