Kenneth Batcher

Dr. Batcher received a B.S.E.E. degree from Iowa State University in 1957 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois in 1962 and 1964, respectively. He worked in the Computer Engineering Department of Goodyear Aerospace Corporation (later Loral Defense Systems Division, now Lockheed-Martin Tactical Defense Systems Division) for 28 years where he developed the architectures of two SIMD parallel processors: the STARAN (1972) and the MPP (1983). From 1989 to 2009 he was a member of the faculty at Kent State University. He is the author of several technical papers and has 14 patents. He discovered two parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort. He also discovered a method of scrambling data in a random access memory to allow accesses along multiple dimensions; these memories were used in the STARAN and the MPP. In 1990, Dr. Batcher was awarded the Eckert-Mauchly Award from the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society "for the pioneering implementation of parallel computers and for contributions to interconnection network theory." In 2007, he was awarded the Seymour Cray Computer Science & Engineering Award from the IEEE Computer Society "for the fundamental theoretical and practical contributions to massively parallel computation, including parallel sorting algorithms, interconnection networks, and pioneering designs of the STARAN and MPP computers." He is a Fellow in the ACM and a member of SIGARCH. 1953 High School Diploma - Brooklyn Technical High School, Brooklyn, NY. 1957 B.S.E.E. - Iowa State University, Ames, IA 1962 M.S. - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 1964 Ph.D. - University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL