Zhiyuan Li has led a group to design and implement an interprocedural parallelizing Fortran compiler, called Panorama, which performs highly efficient array data flow analysis to enable aggressive loop parallelization and to perform data allocation and task scheduling on distributed shared-memory multiprocessors (DSM). Li collaborates with a group at the University of Minnesota to build the Agassiz C compiler for a future generation of microprocessors which can speculatively execute parallel threads on multiple thread units.

Li received a National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award and a National Science Foundation Career Award in 1992 and 1995 respectively. In 1998, he co-edited with P.-C. Yew, a special issue on Compilers and Languages for Parallel and Distributed Computers for IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems and two special issues on Compilers and Languages for Parallel Computing for the International Journal on Parallel Programming. Li, with P.-C. Yew, co-chaired the 10th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing in 1997. He has served as a program committee member for several international conferences, including IEEE/ACM International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS/SPDP), ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, and International Conference on Parallel Processing.