Ken Batcher
From Free net encyclopedia
Ken Batcher is one of the computer architects at Goodyear Aerospace (now Lockheed Martin) in Akron, Ohio, USA. Among the designs he worked on 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 Spaceflight Center [currently at 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.
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."