Ken Batcher

Who is Ken Batcher?

Ken Batcher is an 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. In 1964, Batcher received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School.

Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were the:

Massively Parallel Processor 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 was found in the US Navy Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye radar planes.

In 1990, Batcher was awarded the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award for his pioneering work on parallel computers. He holds 14 patents.

In 2007, Batcher was awarded the IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for "For fundamental theoretical and practical contributions to massively parallel computation, including parallel sorting algorithms, interconnection networks, and pioneering designs of the STARAN and MPP computers."