Ken Batcher

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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."

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