At the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP'10), the paper "Does Cache Sharing on Modern CMP Matter to the Performance of Contemporary Multi-threaded Programs?" by College of William and Mary graduate students Eddy Zhang and Yunlian Jiang, and Prof. Xipeng Shen was selected as the best paper. PPoPP is the premier forum for presentation of research in all aspects of parallel software. This year saw a record number of submissions, with only 29 papers accepted out of 173 submissions (16.8% acceptance rate). The Best Paper award is given to a single paper from all the submissions.

In 2006, William Scherer III (Ph.D. '06), then a student of Michael Scott, was awarded best student paper. Michael Scott chaired the conference in 2008.