I am a professor in the Computer Science Department within the Courant Institute of New York University, where I once directed the NYU Ultracomputer Project . I was elected a fellow of the ACM in 2005.
Our Ultracomputer group studied a wide range of issues in highly parallel computing. We constructed two generations of hardware an 8-processor, bus-based system in the 1980s and a 16-processor, 16-memory module system in the 90s. Both systems have hardware support for fetch-and-add, our coordination primitive. The newer system contained full-custom switches of our own design that combine simultaneous references to the same memory address, thereby avoiding one important class of hot-spot contention problems. We had a very highly parallel operating system Symunix running on both systems.
I worked, mostly part-time, at the NEC Research Institute (now part of NEC Labs America) from where I was first involved in the LAMP group that has constructed several Local Area MultiProcessors (a.k.a. Beowolfs, clusters, COWs, and NOWs). I was briefly involved in a protein folding computation and was also part of the Intermemory group that studied highly distributed world-wide archival storage. My last project at NEC involved forming ``web communities'', i.e., pages related by link structure or language similarity.
I was born 2 August 1945 in Queens NYC to Frances and Irving Gottlieb. When I was five, my family moved to a NYC surburb called Elmont, Long Island where I attended the local public elementary and high schools. I went to MIT as an undergraduate and Brandeis as a graduate student. All my degrees are in mathematics.
My introduction to computers (specifically an IBM 650 and a Bendix G15) occurred during high school when I attended the Columbia University Science Honors Program on Saturdays.
My beautiful wife Alice is dermatologist-in-chief Tufts-New England Medical Center as well as chair of the dermatology department at Tufts University School of Medicine. She obtained a Ph.D. in immunology from Rockefeller University, an M.D. from Cornell Medical School, and medical sub-specialty degrees from N.Y. Hospital (Internal Medicine and Dermatology) and the Hospital for Special Surgery (Rheumatology). Our two boys, David and Michael, were born in 1982 and 1985 respectively. Family photos are here.