Ken Batcher

Updated: 03/06/2020 by Computer Hope
Ken Batcher

Name: Ken E. Batcher

Born: December 27, 1935

Computer-related contributions

  • Emeritus professor of Computer Science at Kent State University and former computer architect at Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio for 28 years.
  • Designed 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) unit. The unit was located at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and is now in the Smithsonian. This unit predates Danny Hillis' Thinking Machines Corporation's Connection Machine.
  • Credited with discovering two important parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort.

Honors and awards

  • Awarded the IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award (2007).
  • Awarded the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award (1990).

Quotes

"A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."