Ken Batcher is a professor of Computer Science at Kent State University. He also worked as a computer architect at Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, 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 for fault-tolerance) which was located at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and is now in the Smithsonian. This unit predates Danny Hillis' Thinking Machines Corp.'s Connection Machine

• The Goodyear STARAN associative processor arrays, a version of which (called ASPRO) was found in the US 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.

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

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• Kent State University Research profile

References

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Batcher, K. E., "Design of a Massively Parallel Processor," IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. C29, September 1980, 836-840.

American designers | computer pioneers | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumni