Ken Batcher
Encyclopedia
Ken Batcher is an emeritus professor of Computer Science
at Kent State University
. He also worked as a computer architect
at Goodyear Aerospace
in Akron, Ohio
for 28 years. In 1964, Batcher received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering
from the University of Illinois
. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School
.
Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were the:
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."
He is credited with discovering two important parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort
.
Batcher is known for his half-serious, half-humorous definition that "A supercomputer
is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
at Kent State University
Kent State University
Kent State University is a public research university located in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university has eight campuses around the northeast Ohio region with the main campus in Kent being the largest...
. He also worked as a computer architect
Computer architecture
In computer science and engineering, computer architecture is the practical art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals and the formal modelling of those systems....
at Goodyear Aerospace
Goodyear Aerospace
Goodyear Aerospace Corporation was the aerospace and defense subsidiary of Goodyear.-Early Years:The company began as Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.’s Aeronautics Department and renamed in 1917 as the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation set up to construct dirigibles for the US military...
in Akron, Ohio
Akron, Ohio
Akron , is the fifth largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Summit County. It is located in the Great Lakes region approximately south of Lake Erie along the Little Cuyahoga River. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 199,110. The Akron Metropolitan...
for 28 years. In 1964, Batcher received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
from the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School
Brooklyn Technical High School
Brooklyn Technical High School, commonly called Brooklyn Tech or just Tech, and also administratively as High School 430, is a New York City public high school that specializes in engineering, math and science and is the largest specialized high school for science, technology, engineering, and...
.
Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were the:
- Massively Parallel ProcessorGoodyear MPPThe Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor was amassively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospacefor the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than...
(16,384 custom bit-serial processors {8 to a chip} organized in a SIMDSIMDSingle instruction, multiple data , is a class of parallel computers in Flynn's taxonomy. It describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data simultaneously...
128 x 128 processor array with additional CPU rows for fault-tolerance) which was located at the NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
Goddard Space Flight CenterGoddard Space Flight CenterThe Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC employs approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors, and is located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. GSFC,...
, and is now in the Smithsonian. This unit predates Danny Hillis' Thinking Machines Corporation's Connection MachineConnection MachineThe Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation... - The Goodyear STARANSTARANSTARAN might be the first commercially available computer designed around an associative memory. The STARAN computer was designed and built by Goodyear Aerospace Corporation. It is a Content Addressable Parallel Processor, a type of parallel processor which uses content addressable memory...
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
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
/IEEE
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...
Eckert-Mauchly Award
Eckert-Mauchly Award
The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who between 1943 and 1946 collaborated on the design and construction of the first large scale electronic computing...
for his pioneering work on parallel computers. He holds 14 patents.
In 2007, Batcher was awarded the IEEE
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...
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."
He is credited with discovering two important parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort
Bitonic sorter
Bitonic mergesort is a parallel algorithm for sorting. It is also used as a construction method for building a sorting network. The algorithm was devised by Ken Batcher...
.
Batcher is known for his half-serious, half-humorous definition that "A supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."