Ken E. Batcher

Designer of the Massively Parallel Processor, Batcher created one of the most significant parallel computing architectures of its era. Among the designs Batcher 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 predated 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 E2-C Hawkeye AWACS planes.

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