According to her official IBM biography: "as a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, she has made seminal contributions to the field. Her work on inter procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to be on the leading edge of compiler research. She has successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and Parallel FORTRAN". The outstanding work performed by Allen made it possible to achieve high performance from computers while programming them in languages suitable to applications. They have contributed to advances in the use of high performance computers for solving problems such as weather forecasting, DNA matching, and national security functions.

The Turing Award, first presented in 1966, and named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The prize carries a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation. ACM will present the Turing Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 9, 2007, in San Diego, CA.