- Ken Batcher
Ken Batcher is a professor of
Computer Science atKent State University . He also worked as a computer architect atGoodyear Aerospace inAkron, Ohio for 28 years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1969.Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were the:
* Massively Parallel Processor (16,384 custom bit-serial processors {8 to a chip} organized in a
SIMD 128 x 128 processor array with additional CPU rows forfault-tolerance ) which was located at theNASA Goddard Space Flight Center , and is now in theSmithsonian . This unit predatesDanny Hillis 'Thinking Machines Corp.'sConnection Machine * The Goodyear
STARAN associative processor arrays, a version of which (called ASPRO) was found in theUS Navy E2-C Hawkeye AWACS planes.In 1990, Batcher was awarded the ACM/IEEE
Eckert-Mauchly Award for his pioneering work on parallel computers. He holds 14 patents.In 2007, Batcher was awarded the IEEE
Seymour Cray Award for "For fundamental theoretical and practical contributions to massively parallel computation, including parallel sorting algorithms, interconnection networks, and pioneering designs of the STARAN and MPP computers."Batcher is best known for his half-serious, half-humorous definition that "A
supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."External links
* [http://www.cs.kent.edu/faculty/batcher.html Kent State University Research profile]
References
*Batcher, K. E., "Design of a Massively Parallel Processor," "IEEE Transactions on Computers", Vol. C29, September 1980, 836-840.
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