Howard Gobioff passed away on March 11th after battling Lymphoma for the last 5 years. Howard was merely an acquaintance in my world but he was the older brother one of my closet friends and I know he was very much loved by his family.
Howard was brilliant, creative, curious, and a very generous soul. You may not know him personally but his contributions to computer science have undoubtedly made your life better. Howard was a research scientist with Google, a company he joined in 1999 when there were only 40 employees.
“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.”
I wish to leave you with a collection of research papers Howard wrote or co-authored, perhaps they will inspire you to do amazing things:
Smart Cards in Hostile Environments.
Security for a High Performance Commodity Storage Subsystem.
Integrity and Performance in Network Attached Storage.
Security for Network Attached Storage Devices.
Google File System.
Stochastic Voting Protocol To Protect Voters Privacy.
File Server Scaling with Network-Attached Secure Disks.
A Cost-Effective, High-Bandwidth Storage Architecture.