Obituary of Bernard Pierce

Bernard Roy Pierce, born August 1, 1947 in Ogdensburg, NY has passed at the age of 65. Bernie was one of 8 sons to Merrill and Lourene Pierce. He and his wife June Kelley (Pierce), married in 1964, built a loving family with their daughters Lisa Rieckermann and Lori Abendschein. While building his family, Bernie studied and graduated from Clarkson University in 1970 with both a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mathematics. In the same year he began his career with IBM, where he was most recently employed as Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), reserved for the top two percent of IBM employees, for System z Hardware Development, zOS Programming, and Performance Analysis. For a number of years, between his terms of employment with IBM, Bernie also worked with Candle Corporation as a principal consultant in Candle's Consulting and Services organization. Over his programming career of 42 years, Bernie was a leader and innovator in performance analysis and design for both Candle Corporation and IBM. He led teams of consultants who focused on performance and capacity issues for the Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) platform and the Parallel Sysplex environment. These inventions, generally known as the "true ready queue" and "reduced preemption," were instrumental to the scalability of symmetric multiprocessors. Additionally, Bernie was a frequent speaker at SHARE, GUIDE and other conferences on subjects related to MVS performance and capacity. He was also a featured speaker at the Candle Performance Conference in Germany and at Candle educational seminars in Europe and the United States. His articles on systems management, systems analysis, system design and capacity and performance were published with the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), for which he delivered many presentations. He has also written two series of articles on MVS Workload Manager, and MVS Dispatching Management for the Candle Computer Report. For his work and innovations, he earned over twenty patents and was distinctly recognized in being the named recipient of the prestigious Albert Abraham Michelson Award at the 24th annual international conference of the CMG December 9, 1998. Bernie was a loving husband, brother, father, and grandfather, adored by his 4 grandsons, Noah and Caleb Rieckermann, and Aidan and Ian Abendschein. He greatly embraced his extended family, Christopher Klabes, Kimberly Davis, and a host of loving and caring friends. There will be a memorial service at Timothy Doyle Funeral Home at 371 Hooker Avenue in Poughkeepsie on Wednesday, October 10th at 10 a.m. Following the service, the family will receive friends and family until 1 p.m. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for any donations be made to the local food bank.