Oyekunle Ayinde (Kunle) 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.[1]
Olukotun did his undergraduate studies at Calvin College,[2] and his doctoral studies in computer engineering at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Trevor N. Mudge.[3]
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.[4] 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;[5] at Sun, Olukotun was one of the architects of the 2005 UltraSPARC T1 processor.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]
Olukotun is also a member of the board of advisors of UDC, a Nigerian venture capital firm.[2] He 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".[9] He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008.[10]
Olukotun has used several words from his African heritage in his research. Afara, the name of the company he founded, means "bridge" in the Yoruba language,[5] 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.[11]