Tekedia Nigeria Techstars Series: Every Friday, we will profile one Nigerian doing awesome job in the technology arena. Today, meet Prof Kunle of Stanford University. He is one of the world’s best in his job. He specializes is developing programs that enable multi-core processors to work in harmony, among others. We are careful to write it -but without his works, some of the multi-core chips on sale worldwide may not be possible. He is a legend and highly respected in the industry. This is a man who when he speaks, the industry listens. In one of his interviews in ACM few years ago, he made is known that building and packing cores is not the problem, the key one is optimizing them to work effectively. People, this is your own – Prof Kunle Olukotun.
Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and he has been on the faculty since 1991. Olukotun is well known for leading the Stanford Hydra research project which developed one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS). Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is at the center of Sun’s throughput computing initiative. Niagara based systems have become one of Sun’s fastest ramping products ever. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems. Olukotun currently co-leads the Transactional Coherence and Consistency project whose goal is to make parallel programming accessible to average programmers. Olukotun also directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) which seeks to proliferate the use of parallelism in all application areas. Olukotun is an ACM Fellow (2006) for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi threaded processor design. He has authored many papers on CMP design and parallel software and recently completed a book on CMP architecture. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.