Prof. Leiserson's research centers on developing theoretical principles of parallel and distributed computing, especially as they relate to engineering reality. Prof. Leiserson pioneered the development of VLSI theory and has written many papers on VLSI algorithms, graph layout, and computer-aided design. His contributions include the divide-and-conquer method of graph layout and the retiming method for optimizing digital circuitry. Prof. Leiserson has been a leader in the development of parallel computing. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote the first paper on systolic architectures with his advisor H.T. Kung. While Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 Supercomputer, which was the world's most powerful supercomputer in 1993. The CM-5 incorporated the fat-tree interconnection network Prof. Leiserson developed at MIT. Prof. Leiserson has designed and engineered many parallel algorithms, including ones for matrix linear algebra, graph algorithms, optimization, and sorting. Of particular note, he introduced the notion of cache-oblivious algorithms, which exploit a hierarchy of processor caches efficiently without any tuning of cache-dependent parameters.
Prof. Leiserson's recent research has focused on multithreaded computing. He developed the first provably good work-stealing scheduler that guarantees the efficient execution of multithreaded programs. He and his Supertech Research Group designed and developed the Cilk multithreaded programming language, which incorporates work-stealing and vastly simplifies multiprocessor programming. His research team implemented the StarTech, *Socrates, and Cilkchess parallel chess-playing programs, which have won numerous prizes in international competition. A team of Cilk programmers led by Prof. Leiserson won First Prize in the 1998 ICFP Programming Contest sponsored by the International Conference on Functional Programming, in which Cilk was declared to be “the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers.”
Prof. Leiserson's academic work has won many awards. His Ph.D. dissertation, Area-Efficient VLSI Computation, which deals with the design of systolic systems and with the problem of determining the VLSI area of a graph, won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1982, as well as the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Doctoral Thesis Prize. In 1985 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. His textbook, Introduction to Algorithms, coauthored with Ronald L. Rivest, and Thomas H. Cormen, was named Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book in Computer Science and Data Processing by the Association of American Publishers. The textbook, now in its third edition with an additional coauthor, Clifford Stein, has been the leading textbook on computer algorithms for many years and is the second-most cited publication in computer science, according to CiteSeerX. Professor Leiserson received the 2014 ACM-IEEE 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.” Professor Leiserson received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education award for “worldwide computer science education impact through writing a best-selling algorithms textbook and developing courses on algorithms and parallel programming.” Professor Leiserson and his former Ph.D. student Robert D. Blumofe were awarded the 2013 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for “contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing.” Prof. Leiserson's publications are cited over 10,000 times in the literature, also according to CiteSeerX. He has won many best-paper awards at leading academic conferences. He is a Fellow of four professional societies: AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM.
Prof. Leiserson has been a leader in the development of faculty and student nontechnical skills. His annual workshop on Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty, cotaught with Chuck McVinney, has educated hundreds of faculty at MIT and around the world since 2002 in the human issues involved in leading technical teams in academia. Also, in 2002, he helped found MIT's Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) and served for many years as co-Director of its annual workshop for sophomores.
During 1995-6, Prof. Leiserson was Shaw Visiting Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He is past Computer Science Program Chair for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, a distance-education initiative in which students in Singapore take MIT classes. He held an Adjunct Professorship at the National University of Singapore for many years; was Director of System Architecture, Director of Research, and Network Architect at Akamai Technologies, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts; and was founder and CTO of Cilk Arts, Inc. of Burlington, Massachusetts, before the company was bought by Intel Corporation. He has consulted for many companies over the years. A dedicated teacher, Prof. Leiserson has directly supervised 25 Ph.D. students and over 60 Master's and Bachelor's students.