Glen Culler

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Glen Culler (born July 7, 1927 in Savonburg , † May 3, 2003 ) was an American mathematician and computer developer.

Life

Culler worked as a programmer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the early 1950s before continuing his studies from 1954. He received his doctorate in mathematics ( Polar decomposition and boundary value problems for matrix differential equations ) under Magnus Hestenes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1959 . At UCLA he came into contact with early attempts (Prof. Burton Fried ) to develop symbolic mathematics programs. In 1959 he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he continued work on the development of one of the first interactive graphic computer systems for mathematical programming, the Culler-Fried Online System. They called the program for symbolic mathematics MOLSF (Mathematically Oriented Language, Single Precision, Floating Point), a word processing system COL. There was also a graph using Tektronix storage oscilloscopes. The system was developed with Burton Fried when Culler was released from the UCSB as Assistant Director of the computer lab at Ramo-Woodridge (later TRW Inc.). The system was used at UCSB for teaching mathematics, and when it was introduced in 1962, physicists such as Richard Feynman and John Robert Schrieffer were invited to try the system.

Your system at UCSB was one of the four nodes of the ARPANET , the forerunner of the Internet . In 1969 the UCSB and UCLA nodes exchanged a first data packet.

Culler became a professor at UCSB and head of its data center. In 1969 he founded his own company Culler-Harrison (later CHI and then Culler Scientific). The company developed hardware for digital signal processing and was a pioneer in what was later known as the Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture. One of the systems developed by Culler in the early 1970s was used by the supercomputer manufacturer Floating-Point Systems (FPS AP120B from 1976). Culler Scientific further developed the VLIW architecture for advanced digital signal processors for Motorola .

In 2000 he received the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award and the National Medal of Technology from the US President.

His son Marc Culler is also a mathematician and his son David Culler is a computer science professor at Berkeley.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Video displays were impractical at the time because of the high cost of storage. The computer that was later used at UCSB came from Ramo-Wooldridge, a RW-400 that also only had 26 kB of memory.
  3. ↑ At that time, it was seen as cheap competition for the Cray 1 While this cost 10 million dollars and performed 20 MFlops, the FPS with 3 MFlops only cost around 50,000 dollars
personal data
SURNAME Culler, Glen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Savonburg
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 2003