Kunle Olukotun

Who is Kunle Olukotun?

Oyekunle Ayinde Olukotun is a pioneer of multi-core processors, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and director of the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory at Stanford.

Olukotun did his undergraduate studies at Calvin College, and his doctoral studies in computer engineering at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Trevor N. Mudge.

In the mid-1990s, Olukotun and his co-authors argued that multi-core computer processors were likely to make better use of hardware than existing superscalar designs. In 2000, while a professor at Stanford, Olukotun founded Afara Websystems, a company that designed and manufactured multi-core SPARC-based computer processors for data centers. Afara was purchased by Sun Microsystems in 2002; at Sun, Olukotun was one of the architects of the 2005 UltraSPARC T1 processor. In 2008, Olukotun returned to Stanford, and founded the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory at Stanford after gathering US$6M in funding from several computer-industry corporations. His recent work focuses on domain-specific programming languages that can allow algorithms to be easily adapted to multiple different types of parallel hardware including multi-core systems, graphics processing units, and field-programmable gate arrays.