Ken Batcher

Kenneth "Ken" E. Batcher (* 1935 ) is an American computer designer and computer scientist.

Batcher attended Brooklyn Tech High School , graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor's degree in 1957, and received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1964 . He worked 28 years as a computer architect for Goodyear Aerospace in Akron (later Loral Defense Systems Division, now Lockheed-Martin Tactical Defense Systems Division). From 1989 until his retirement in 2009 he was Professor of Computer Science at Kent State University .

He is the designer of the Staran and Goodyear MPP computers. He also made important contributions to sorting parallel algorithms (he discovered Odd-Even- Mergesort and Bitonic Mergesort) and sorting networks.

The MPP computer (Massively Parallel Processor) was built by Goodyear for the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA from 1979 , was delivered in 1983 and was in operation from 1985 to 1991. It was a massively parallel supercomputer based on the STARAN array processor from Goodyear. He used a network of 128 × 128 interconnected 1-bit processor elements that calculated using the Single Instruction Multiple Data method (SIMD).

The STARAN parallel computer system from Goodyear was delivered in 1972 and consisted of 4 × 256 1-bit processor elements, SIMD architecture and associative memory (Content Addressable Memory). It was used in the Northrop Grumman Hawkeye , for example .

In 1990 he received the Eckert-Mauchly Award and in 2007 the Seymour Cray Award .

Web links

• Homepage at Kent State