CISE Industry Roundtable, John-Nicholas Furst
CISE welcomed John-Nicholas Furst, Hardware Engineer at Akamai Technologies, to the 1st Spring 2017 Industry Roundtable. Furst began his career at Akamai after graduating from Boston University in 2013. At Akamai, Furst created the firmware that runs Akamai’s network switches, responsible for delivering tens of terabits of web-content daily to end users all over the world. Akamai has the world’s largest content delivery network and Furst is responsible for “anything you can touch”. His team is primarily comprised of hardware engineers and he works on “hardware features and spends time with intel, vendors, look at what is coming out in the next year and evaluates and prototypes future hardware platforms and architectures.” Furst also continues to be engaged in research projects beyond work, hack-a-thons at various universities, and participates in a variety of contests, keeping with his go-getter attitude.
As a student at Boston University, Furst worked on performance characterization of many-core processors with his advisor, Professor Ayse Coskun. He was heavily involved in events such as BUILDS and in competitions such as system building at the Supercomputing Conference. Additionally, Furst co-authored a conference paper and workshop paper which he presented at Intel in Germany.