(Copied from 1989 Silverlogue, page 44 and 45)
After Seven intense weeks this summer in St. Paul, MN, the Blair team finished as one of the four finalists out of 1480 schools throughout the nation in ‘SuperQuest – The High School Supercomputing Challenge.’
Junior Maneesh Agrawala and Seniors Sven Khatri, Dan Mall, and Howard Gobioff brought back with them not only the experience of working with experts on top notch computers, but also a CYBER 910 graphics work station valued at $50,000 – $100,000. Each student also received their own Atari microcomputer, softwre, and a $3,000 grant. It was a worthwhile experience, no matter if the students got any prizes or not, said Mary Ellen Verona, Blair magnet computer science teacher and sponsor of the Superquest team.
When the actual contest began at ETS, they had to work even harder on their problems, preparing extensive reports on their progress for a panel of judges. Toward the end in August, it wasn’t unusual to work 18 hour days or stay up all night. But just havingt the experience of working with experts in the field was worth all the effort.
(copied from GMU alumni website)
“Howard Gobioff escaped from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science in late 1999 with his PhD in Computer Science and joined the fledgling search engine startup, Google. He did not pass go. He did not collect $200. He has had an amusing ride watching, from the inside, as Google went from a 40 person underdog to a 2000+ major company. During his tenure at Google, he has worked on the advertising system, the core crawling system, the indexing system, and lead the Google Filesystem effort for several years. He probably did other things but can’t quite remember what they were. In October 2004, he embarked on a new adventure and relocated to Tokyo Japan to help build Google’s Tokyo R&D center. Howard believes Google is a company that enables a simple computer scientist to fundamentally change the world by improving people’s access to information. Following that adventure, he decided to move to a smaller city so he currently works at Google’s Manhattan Engineering Office.
Howard’s research interests are focused on large scale distributed systems, operating systems, and security. Before entering graduate school, Howard received a bachelor of science degree in computer science and mathematics from University of Maryland, College Park. He is also amused if you read this far.” (from Google Research Scientists and Engineers)
Terrible news this morning. Howard Gobioff, CMU Ph.D. alumnus, co-developer of the Google file system, and political activist, passed away yesterday. The email from Neil Gobioff:From: Gobioff Neil <gonzonia@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 5:09 AM
Subject: Howard Gobioff
It is with great sadness that I write to you today. I don’t know how some of you know Howard, but your email address was in his phone. Howard passed away this afternoon at approximately 1pm after a battle with lymphoma. He was originally diagnosed in 2003 with a non-aggressive type of lymphoma and chose not to tell anyone including his family. On 1/31/2008 he was admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital with pneumonia and found that the cancer had transformed into something more aggressive. He asked me to come up on 2/8/2008. Two days later he was admitted to the ICU and I informed the rest of his family. For the last 31 days Howard put up quite a fight but eventually acquired an infection that his body was no longer able to fight.
He will be buried in Hollywood, Florida this Friday (3/14/2008) atBeth David Memorial Gardens
3201 NW 72nd Ave
Hollywood, FL 33024
Picture from 2004