Howard Gobioff, 1971-2008

News

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) at

Beth David Memorial Gardens
3201 NW 72nd Ave
Hollywood, FL 33024

The service will be at 2pm in the chapel.

For those of you unable to attend I will be putting together something in NY sometime in the near future and will keep you informed.

Please do not send flowers. If you’d like to do something, please donate to one of the charities Howard chose to leave money to:

Lymphoma and Lukemia Society
ACLU Foundation
Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Thank you,

Neil Gobioff

Howard Gobioff received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. He was advised by Garth Gibson and Doug Tygar and was a key member of the CMU Parallel Data Lab. He joined Google when it was a 40-person startup, and became a key architect of the Google file system. Always fascinated with Japan and Japanese culture, in 2004 he launched Google’s Tokyo R&D center and then later moved to Google’s Manhattan office. Howard has been involved in a variety of core Google projects, including the advertising system and the main crawling/indexing system. He was always an active and loyal alumnus, visiting CMU every year to meet up with old friends, give lectures, and recruit people to join Google.

Peter Lee @ March 12, 2008