Burton J. Smith
Burton Jordan Smith (March 21, 1941 - April 3, 2018 in Burien , Washington ) was an American computer designer.
Life
Smith received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico in 1967 and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972 . He taught at MIT and the University of Colorado from 1970 to 1979 . He then spent six years at Denelcor Inc. in Colorado, where he was the main architect of the Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP), which was launched in 1982. It uses multithreading ( barrel computer ) and is considered the first commercially available multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) computer. 1985 to 1988 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Defense Analyzes , where he was also in supercomputer research. In 1988 he was one of the founders of the Tera Computer Company (first Washington, DC , then Seattle ), which manufactured the MTA supercomputer (later Cray-MTA), which uses alternating multithreading of tasks in the many registers of the respective processors ( barrel computer ) . In 2000 they bought Cray Research and Tera Computer was renamed Cray Inc. Smith served as a senior scientist and served on the board from 1988 to 2005 and chairman of the board of directors of Tera and later Cray from 1988 to 1999.
Since 2005 he has been a Technical Fellow of Microsoft Corporation , reporting directly to the Chief Technical Officer.
Smith was regarded as one of the leading experts in high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. In 1991 he received the Eckert-Mauchly Award . In 2003 he received the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering . In 2010 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
He died on April 3, 2018 at Highline Medical Center in Burien, Washington.
Web links
- Biography (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Honoring Burton Smith, a creative visionary in computing Microsoft , accessed April 5, 2018
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Smith, Burton J. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Smith, Burton Jordan |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 21, 1941 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 3rd April 2018 |
| Place of death | Burien , Washington |