British-born Nigerian computer scientist, Dr Kunle Olukotun is well-known in the engineering industry for his substantial contributions to the field in the form of tactile inventions and in-depth research.
Olukotun worked as a student to earn a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College in Michigan, then a master’s and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1987 and 1991 respectively.
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The same year he earned his doctorate, Olukotun joined the faculty of Stanford University as the Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
While at Stanford, Olukotun became the leader of the Stanford Hydra chip multiprocessor (CMP) research project. The project, described as “a promising way to build a small-scale MP-on-a-chip with a fairly simple design while maintaining excellent performance on a wide variety of applications” allowed for the development of “one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS).”
With this groundbreaking experience and prolific research under his belt, Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop “high-throughput, low-power multicore processors for server systems”. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems which used Olukotun’s previous technological innovations to create the UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, more commonly known as “Niagara”, a multithreading, multicore CPU1.
Olukotun is now known as the father of the multi-core processor.
His research interests include computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems, domain-specific languages and high-level compilers.
Kunle Olukotun was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2006 for his “contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi-threaded processor design”. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008.
Olukotun has used several words from his Yoruba heritage in his research. Afara, the name of the company he founded, means “bridge” in the Yoruba language, and he has named his server at Stanford Ogun after the Yoruba god of iron and steel, a play on words since large computers are frequently called big iron.
Olukotun holds 12 US patents. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and written two textbooks.
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