Daniel Slotnick

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Daniel Leonid Slotnick (born November 12, 1931 in New York City , † 1985 ) was an American mathematician , computer engineer and pioneer for parallel computers .

Slotnick studied mathematics at Columbia University , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1951 and his master's degree in 1952 . Afterwards he was involved in the project of the IAS computer by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1954 he began his doctoral studies in New York and received his doctorate in 1956 with Jürgen Moser and Kurt Friedrichs at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University ( Asymptotic Behavior of Solutions of Canonical Systems Near a Closed Unstable Orbit ) He then spent a year researching at Princeton University and then went to IBM's development lab in Poughkeepsie . There he worked under Rex Rice on minicomputers and published one of the first papers on parallel numerical computing with John Cocke in 1958 . He later developed data communication and data processing systems for stock traders.

In 1960 he went to Westinghouse Electric Corporation to realize his ideas for parallel computers , which he had already had during his time at von Neumann in Princeton, in the Solomon project, a SIMD parallel computer with 1024 1-bit processor elements (each with memory for 128 32-bit words). In 1962, he submitted a patent for parallel computers with a central control unit, which was granted to him in 1966. From 1965 he was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he started the ILLIAC IV project of a parallel computer (supported by Ivan Sutherland , Lawrence G. Roberts ). It was built for NASA in cooperation with the Burroughs Corporation , but was not in operation until 1972 due to various problems and was fully functional from 1976. It was decommissioned in 1981. At the time, the ILLIAC IV was the fastest computer in the world (with up to 300 MIPS ) for the special, easily parallelizable problems for which it was primarily used (numerical hydrodynamics), but was being developed by supercomputers like the Cray 1 at the end of the 1970s Years out of date. The ILLIAC IV was of great importance for the development of parallel computers in the USA.

Since he was also interested in municipal development planning, he also became a professor at the UIUC in 1975 in the Faculty of Landscape Architecture.

In 1976 he became an IEEE Fellow and in 1962 he received the AFIPS Prize. In 1965 he was a Mellon Lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University . In 1983 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award .

literature

  • Paul B. Schneck: Dedication. Daniel L. Slotnick, 1931 to 1985. In: The Journal of Supercomputing. Volume 1, 1987, pp. 5-6.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Cocke, Slotnick Use of parallelism in numerical calculations , Research Memorandum, IBM 1958
  3. ^ Gregory Wilson History of Development of Parallel Computation
personal data
SURNAME Slotnick, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Slotnick, Daniel Leonid (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 1985