Ken Batcher

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

Batcher attended Brooklyn Tech High School, graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and in 1964 received his doctorate at the University of Illinois in electrical engineering. He worked for 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 a professor of computer science at Kent State University.

He is the designer of the Staran and Goodyear MPP computer. He also made ​​important contributions to parallel sorting algorithms ( he discovered Odd -even mergesort and bitonic mergesort ) and sorting networks.

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

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

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