Bradley C. Kuszmaul

News

The CM-5 paper won the innaugural 2023 SPAA Test-of-Time Award.

I left Google in January 2023.

I am cited as a contributor to the Akamai Content Delivery Network, which won the 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award

Our paper "Optimizing Every Operation in a Write-Optimized File System" won the best paper award at FAST 2016.

Our paper "BetrFS: A Right-Optimized Write-Optimized File SYstem" won runner up for best paper at FAST 2015.

I released SuperMalloc in 2015.

My blog

My Cilk entry won the HPC Challenge Class 2 (Most productivity) award for "Best Combination of Elegance and Performance".

Who am I?

I worked at Google from 2020 to 2023 on the cache infrastructure for Google's content delivery offering.

I worked at Oracle from 2016 to 2020 on their cloud file storage service.

I was a Research Scientist in the Supercomputing Technologies Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.

Before that I was Akamai Technologies, and before that I was an assistant professor in the Yale University Department of Computer Science with a joint appointment in the Yale University Department of Electrical Engineering.

I've been involved with several startups.

My research applies algorithm design to solve systems problems in high-performance computing. I was one of the principal architects of the Connection Machine CM-5, and am the co-author of two world-class computer chess programs (StarTech and *Socrates.) I participated at MIT in the Cilk development project, which provides an algorithmic multithreaded programming system.

As an assistant professor at Yale I worked on the Ultrascalar Project, in which we improved the theoretical bounds for how fast a superscalar processor's clock can run, as a function of the window size or the issue width. We also had an 8-issue out-of-order processor fabricated in a 0.18 micron copper/low-K VLSI process. We also worked on developing the mechanisms for a speculative dataflow processor.

Teaching:

• I co-taught 6.896, Theory of Parallel Hardware in Spring 2004.
• I co-taught 6.895, Theory of Parallel Systems in Fall 2003.
• I taught Yale CS 422, Operating Systems in Spring 1999e(and taught it in Spring '97, and Spring '98).
• I taught Yale CS 112, Introduction to Programming (in Java) in Fall 1997.
• I taught Yale CS 201, Introduction to Computer Science in Fall 1996.
• I taught Yale CS 112, Introduction to Pascal in Spring 1996.

One tool I often use in my projects is to measure the use of critical-path length to understand the inherent parallelism of a program. The Cilk paper explains in detail what critial-path length is and how to use it

In my microprocessor research, we actually measure the critical-path length of ordinary serial programs.

My wide-area multithreading research investigates how to run Cilk programs efficiently on the internet. I want to build a chess program that runs on 100,000 processors on the web. Needless to say, there are interesting problems. Mike Bernstein, working under my supervision, has built a version of Cilk that can run efficiently with limited bandwidth, such as is found on the internet.

Topics:

• Publications.
• The Cilk project.
• I was one of the principal architects of the Connection Machine CM-5.
  • See my gallery of CM-5 images.
  • Also see my archive of Thinking Machines Connection Machine CM-5 manuals and documents.
• The Ultrascalar Project.
• As part of the dataflow project, I have developed a dataflow graph library for C. A tar file snapshot is available as well as the rpms. (Note that the actual sources are in my cvs repository.)
• Some publications (not mine) from the MIT dataflow research. I don't know anywhere else on the web to find these:
  • Monsoon Software Interface Specifications by Kenneth R. Traub, Michael J. Beckerle, James E. Hicks, Gregory M. Papadopoulos, Andrew Shaw and Jonathan Young. Motorola Technical Report MCRC-TR-1, January 1990. Also published as CSG Group Memo 296.
  • MINT White Paper by Kennth R. Traub, Motorola Technical Report MCRC-TR-2, October 31, 1989.
  • The Tagged Token Dataflow Architecture by Arvind, David E. Culler, Robert A. Iannucci, Vinod Kathail, Keshav Pingali, and Robert E. Thomas, (Preliminary version for distribution in subject 6.83s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 8 August 1983.)
  • And some more papers that aren't mine.
• Some linux hacks.
• Some of my emacs hacks.
• Check out The Yale Multithreaded Programming Workshop.
• The *Socrates Parallel Computer Chess Program.
• Some publications (not mine) from the early days of chess research and alpha-beta search (here because they are otherwise hard to find on the web):
  • Game Trees, m&n Minimaxing, and the m&n Alpha Beta Procedure by James R. Slagle, University of California, Artificial Intellgence Group Report No. 3, November 8, 1963, Lawrence Radition Laboratory, Livermore California.
• I worked on wide-area Cilk. Michael Bernstein and I hacked up a wide-area Cilk.
• I wrote some To The Point Instructions for Using CVS that several of my friends have found helpful. I moved beyond cvs to svn a long time ago, and then on to git. Git documentation is so bad....
• Some notes from the days when Jack Dennis was leading the vimval research team.
• I found a proper reference to the original Turbo-Encabulator article.

Professional Service:

• I was general chair for Charles E. Leiserson's 60th-Birthday Symposium and Party.
• I was on the program committee for SPAA-12 in Bar Harbor, Maine.
• I was on the program committee for the IPPS '95 Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing which was held in conjunction with IPPS '95 on April 25, 1995.

Meta Writing:

• Neil Illusions, by Allan Neil.

Flamage:

• I don't put gratuitous pictures of myself in my web pages. For an alternative point of view, see a new suggested policy that a friend of mine suggested.
• Can I annoy you with javascript?
• When you want to contemplate about large numbers of ducks, think about a yobiduck.

Humbling:

For the purposes of a morality play, I have finally put a picture of myself on the web. I visited Connection Machine Services (all that is left of the Thinking Machines computer business) one day in May 2000: And scored a CM-5 LED board: How the mighty have fallen:

Personal:

• I practice Aikido at Tekkojuku and occasionally at the MIT Aikido club.
• My son John H. Kuszmaul is a 2017 Siemens semifinalist and a 2016 Siemens semifinalist.
• William H. Kuszmaul is also my son.
  • I read William Kuszmaul's blog, Algorithm Soup.
  • He a graduate student at MIT where he is a Hertz Fellow, an NSF GRFP fellow, and has received an MIT Akamai Fellowship.
  • He mentored Michael Ma who was a Regeneron STS 2018 Finalist and a 2017 Siemens regional finalist.
  • He mentored Kevin Chang who became a Regeneron STS 2017 Scholar.
  • He won 3rd Place in the Intel STS 2014 competition and won the Intel STS Glenn T. Seaborg Speaker Award, and was a Siemens Competetition Regional Finalist twice.
  • He was awarded a 2013 Davidson Fellowship for his work on `Equivalence Classes of Permutations Created Under Pattern-Replacement Relations'.

Contact Information:

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