Fwd: John

[http://www.comcast.net/~alan]

Robert, 

Sorry to be the bearer of sad news, but I dont know whether you've seen this. 

Always enjoy your annual treatise. 

Alan 

----- Forwarded Message ----- 
From: "Matt Reilly" <http://www.mac.com/~matthewreilly> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 11:55:52 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: John 

As many of you have heard, John passed away on Sunday. His loss 
will be deeply felt. 

His friends, colleagues, and family will be gathering at the Fowler 
Kennedy Funeral Home in Maynard, MA from 5 to 8 PM on Friday the 12th 
of February. Memorial services will be at 11 AM on Saturday the 13th 
at the First Parish Church in Stow, MA, with funeral and reception to 
follow. The family asks that you not send flowers, but instead make a 
donation to one of the charities to be named later or to your favorite 
charity. Please forward this note as you feel appropriate. 

 For those of you who hadn't yet heard, here is the notice we 
(Philip, Jud, Bob, and Matt) sent to HPCwire: 

John passed away on Sunday, February 7, 2010. Â For the many who 
loved and worked with him, his humor, charm, and genuine interest in 
those around him were only matched by his enthusiasm, intellect and 
his love of solving problems. 

A dynamic blend of entrepreneur and mensch, he studied physics at Penn 
State, taking a PhD at Carnegie Mellon, and joined Digital Equipment 
Corporation as an engineer. Â He joked that his color-blindness meant 
he couldn't tell the color-coded wires apart, and thus he was moved to 
management, where as Group Manager for the Government Systems Group, 
he had profit and loss responsibility for worldwide sales to federal 
governments. 

In 1986, he joined the Cambridge startup Thinking Machines and served 
as Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Technical Research, 
developing the company's business in government, academic, and 
technical research markets, and he created the Business Supercomputing 
division. Â John left Thinking Machines to help form Continuum Software 
in 1994 to expand the use of high-performance parallel computing in 
business applications. Â With the development of the web, Continuum 
changed its focus to analysis of web links as a guide to relevance, 
predating Google's "page rank" algorithm. 

In 2002, he cofounded SiCortex, a developer of high-efficiency, 
high-performance computer systems for technical, scientific, and 
engineering applications, and led its development through the 
introduction of a full range of system products. 

John's extensive network of friends and colleagues spanned the 
globe. He relished every opportunity to bring people together, whether 
it was to build a team, sell a system or simply enjoy a meal. It seems 
that everyone in high performance computing has a story to tell of how 
instrumental John was in introducing new paradigms for high-end 
computation ranging from massive parallelism to extreme low-power 
multi-core. 
  
John will be remembered, first and foremost, for how he made people 
feel - how he cared for them and helped them solve problems of all 
sorts, whether personal, professional, or technical. 

He is survived by his brother Robert, sister Germaine Dietz, sons 
Philip and David and his partner of many years, Evelyn Neuburger.