Kenneth Edward Batcher (December 27, 1935 – August 22, 2019) was an American academic who was emeritus professor of Computer Science at Kent State University. He also worked as a computer architect at Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio for 28 years.
Background
Kenneth Edward Batcher was born on December 27, 1935 in Queens, New York, to Lois and Ralph Batcher. His parents met at Iowa State University and later relocated to New York City after graduation. His father, Ralph R. Batcher, was the Chief Engineer of The A. H. Grebe Radio Company until its bankruptcy in 1932.
Batcher graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School,
Career and achievements
Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were 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) which 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
- The Goodyear STARAN associative processor arrays, a version of which (called ASPRO) was found in the US Navy Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye radar planes.
Batcher published several technical papers and owns 14 patents of his own. "He discovered two parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort". He is also a discoverer of scrambling data method in a random access memory which allows accesses along multiple dimensions. These memories were used in the STARAN and the MPP parallel processors.
Awards
In 1980, he received an Arnstein Award presented by Goodyear Aerospace Corporation for technical achievement.
Batcher is known for his half-serious, half-humorous definition that "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."
Publications
- Sorting Networks and their Applications, 1968 Spring Joint Computer Conference, AFIPS Proc. vol. 32, pp 307–314.
As author or co-author in "Journal articles"