It was a great shock to us when we were informed by Susannah Jordan about the untimely death of her husband and our colleague on the Editorial Board of Parallel Computing, Harry F. Jordan.
Harry was a long-time member of the Editorial Board for the North, Middle and South American Region of our Journal. As such he played an important role in establishing and maintaining the high professional standards of Parallel Computing. Due to the support of scientists such as Harry, Parallel Computing is one of the top international scientific journals in the world today. It now already forms the basis of assessing the research achievements of top researchers in many countries.
Harry spent most of his professional life, spanning more than three decades, teaching and doing leading-edge research in the fields of computer architecture and parallel processing. Except for sabbaticals, and many summers at ICASE, he spent his entire career at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
At ICASE he was involved in the design and construction of the finite element machine (FEM), an early microcomputer array. The FEM served as a test bed for researchers and led to the identification of many of the key problems of parallel computing.
He was a founding member of the Optical Computing Systems Center, a NSF ERC at the University. In this connection, Harry was the prime mover behind and the leader of a large academic group that designed and built the Bit Serial Optical Computer. The BSOC was a true optical computer, the only one of its kind. The BSOC operated with both data and its microprocessor-like instructions loaded on and read from rewritable optical memory and executed with optical gates.
During the last few years Harry wrote two books encapsulating much of his experience and knowledge. The last of these, ''Fundamentals of Parallel Processing'', was coauthored with Gita Alaghband, a former student. It was published in the Fall of 2002.
Harry held and lived by the highest ethical, moral, academic, and professional standards. His many students benefited greatly from his wise guidance and his extremely thorough and penetrating critique of their work. The same holds true for the work he did as a reviewer of the many papers he reviewed for Parallel Computing.
We, as the editors of Parallel Computing, will miss him and his active support, as will his former students, colleagues, and family.