Charles Eric Leiserson

Inventor of the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, Leiserson is also a pioneer developer of VLSI theory. He designed the fat-tree for the Connection Machine CM5, for which he served as Network Architect. Fat-trees are now the preferred interconnect strategy for Infiniband technology. He helped pioneer the development of VLSI 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. Leiserson also developed the Cilk language for multithreaded programming, which uses a provably good work-stealing algorithm for scheduling.

He received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University in 1975, and his Ph.D. degree in 1981 in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where his advisors were Jon Bentley and H. T. Kung. His dissertation, "Area-Efficient VLSI Computation," won the first ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He then joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has served as a Professor. In addition, Leiserson has been a principal in the Theory of Computation research group in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

While on leave from MIT at Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 Supercomputer, which incorporated the "universal" fat-tree interconnection network he had developed at MIT. He served for many years as head of the Computer-Science program for the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) distance-education collaboration. The lectures for SMA of his undergraduate course on algorithms were videotaped and were one of the first freely available course videos on MIT OpenCourseWare.

His annual workshop on "Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty," co-taught with Chuck McVinney, educated hundreds of faculty at MIT and around the world in the nontechnical issues involved in leading technical teams in academia. Leiserson has served as Director of Research and Director of System Architecture for Akamai Technologies, where he led the engineering team that developed a worldwide content-distribution network numbering over 20,000 servers. He founded Cilk Arts, Inc., a start-up that developed Cilk technology for multicore computing applications. Cilk Arts, Inc. was acquired by Intel in 2009.

The recipient of numerous awards, in 1985 the National Science Foundation awarded Leiserson a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2006 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2013 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the 2014 Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society "for worldwide computer science education impact through writing a best-selling algorithms textbook, and developing courses on algorithms and parallel programming." He was also awarded the 2014 Ken Kennedy Award "For enduring influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development and for distinguished mentoring of computer science leaders and students."

Leiserson has been a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, the highest recognition at MIT for undergraduate teaching. He is an ACM Fellow and a senior member of IEEE and SIAM. He co-authored the standard algorithms textbook, "Introduction to Algorithms," with Ronald L. Rivest and Thomas H. Cormen, which was named "Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book in Computer Science and Data Processing" by the Association of American Publishers. Currently in its third edition with an additional co-author, Clifford Stein, the book is the leading textbook on computer algorithms, having sold over 650,000 copies, and according to Citeseerx, the most cited reference in computer science.

He was also co-author of, with Matteo Frigo and Keith Randall, "The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language," 1998 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Montreal, Canada, June 1998, pp. 212–223; and with C. Scott Ananian, Krste Asanovic, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, and Sean Lie, "Unbounded transactional memory," IEEE Micro, 2006, to appear. An early version appeared in the 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, San Francisco, CA, February 2005, pp. 316–327.