Charles Eric Leiserson

Education

Yale University; Carnegie Mellon University.

Career

He invented the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, including the Connection Machine CM5, for which he was network architect. He helped pioneer the development of Very-large-scale integration theory, including the retiming method of digital optimization with James B. Saxe and systolic arrays with H. T. Kung. He conceived of the notion of cache-oblivious algorithms, which are algorithms that have no tuning parameters for cache size or cache-line length, but nevertheless use cache near-optimally.

He developed the Cilk language for multithreaded programming, which uses a provably good work-stealing algorithm for scheduling.

Leiserson coauthored the standard algorithms textbook Introduction to Algorithms together with Thomas H. Cormen, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Leiserson received a Bachelor of Surgery degree in computer science and mathematics from Yale University in 1975 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1981, where his advisors were Jon Bentley and H. T. Kung.

He then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now a Professor. In addition, he is a principal in the Theory of Computation research group in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and he was formerly Director of Research and Director of System Architecture for Akamai Technologies.

(Cilk Arts, Incorporated was acquired by Intel in 2009)

In 1985, the National Science Foundation awarded him a Presidential Young Investigator Award.

He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics).

Achievements

• He was Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Cilk Arts, Incorporated., a start-up that developed Cilk technology for multicore computing applications. Leiserson"s dissertation, Area-Efficient Very-large-scale integration Computation, won the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award. He received the 2014 Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society "for worldwide computer science education impact through writing a best-selling algorithms textbook, and developing courses on algorithms and parallel programming." He received the 2014 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his "enduring influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development." He was also cited for "distinguished mentoring of computer science leaders and students." He received the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for "contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing.".

Connections

Spouse:

Wendy Lynn Irvine

child:

Katherine Hope Leiserson

child:

William Mitchell Leiserson

child:

Charles Eric Junior Leiserson

child:

Deborah Sue Leiserson