The 1982 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award recognized Charles E. Leiserson for his thesis titled Area-Efficient VLSI Computation, marking an early contribution to the study of integrated circuit design. Since that period, he has maintained a career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on parallel computing theory and the development of high-performance software architectures.
Academic Foundation and Research
Leiserson earned his Bachelor of Science in computer science and mathematics from Yale University in 1975. He completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1981, advised by Jon Bentley and H. T. Kung. Upon joining the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he advanced to the position of Edwin Sibley Webster professor. His leadership roles at the university included serving as principal of the Theory of Computation research group and associate director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
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During the 1980s, Leiserson worked with Thinking Machines Corporation, where he designed the fat-tree interconnection network. This architecture became a standard feature in several supercomputing systems, notably the Connection Machine CM5. His research in VLSI theory resulted in the development of systolic arrays and the retiming method for digital circuit optimization. Furthermore, he established the concept of cache-oblivious algorithms, which allow systems to perform efficiently without requiring manual adjustments for specific memory cache configurations.
Parallel Programming and Industry Contributions
Leiserson created the Cilk programming language to facilitate multithreaded software development, utilizing a work-stealing algorithm for scheduling. The technology supported chess-playing applications like Cilkchess and StarSocrates. He founded Cilk Arts, Inc., which Intel acquired in 2009. His industry experience also includes serving as director of research and system architecture for Akamai Technologies in Boston. In addition, he coauthored the academic text Introduction to Algorithms, which received an award for professional and scholarly achievement in 1990.
Professional Honors
Throughout his career, Leiserson has received numerous distinctions for his academic and practical contributions. He was awarded the Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and was named an MIT Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2007. In 2013, he received the Paris Kanellakis Award for his work on Cilk and parallel computing, followed by the Ken Kennedy Award in 2014. He holds fellowship status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Fast facts
- Born: 1953, Oslo
- Citizenship: United States
- Education: Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University
- Employer: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Known for: Introduction to Algorithms, Cilk programming language
- Fellowships: ACM, AAAS, IEEE, SIAM
Questions readers ask
What is the Cilk programming language?
Cilk is a language developed by Leiserson for multithreaded programming that utilizes a work-stealing algorithm for efficient task scheduling.
What contribution did Leiserson make to supercomputing hardware?
He invented the fat-tree interconnection network, which served as the network architecture for the Connection Machine CM5.
Achievements
- Held posts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Fields: mathematics, informatics and computer science
