David J. Kuck, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1993. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck. While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he developed the Parafrase compiler system (1977), which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations.

 In his role as Director (1986–93) of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD-UIUC), Kuck led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared-memory 32-processor SMP supercomputer completed in 1988 at the University of Illinois.He won Computer Pioneer Award in 2011 for pioneering parallel architectures including the Illiac IV, the Burroughs BSP, and Cedar; and, for revolutionary parallel compiler technology including Parafrase and KAP Tools.