John Leroy Gustafson (born January 19, 1955) is an American computer scientist and businessman, chiefly known for his work in

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

(HPC) such as the invention of

Gustafson's law In computer architecture, Gustafson's law (or Gustafson–Barsis's law) gives the speedup in the execution time of a task that theoretically gains from parallel computing, using a hypothetical run of ''the task'' on a single-core machine as the ba ...

, introducing the first commercial

computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The comp ...

, measuring with QUIPS, leading the reconstruction of the Atanasoff–Berry computer, inventing the

unum Unum Group is an American insurance company headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Founded as Union Mutual in 1848 and known as UnumProvident from 1999-2007, the company is part of the Fortune 500. Unum Group was created by the 1999 merger of ...

number format and computation system,
/ref> and several awards for computer speedup. Currently he is the Chief Technology Officer at Ceranovo, Inc. He was the Chief Graphics Product Architect and Senior Fellow at AMD from September 2012 until June 2013, and he previously held the positions of Architect of Intel Research Lablets, Intel Labs-SC, CEO of Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. and CTO at

ClearSpeed ClearSpeed Technology Ltd was a semiconductor company, formed in 2002 to develop enhanced SIMD processors for use in high-performance computing and embedded systems. Based in Bristol, UK, the company has been selling its processors since 2005. ...

Technology. Gustafson holds applied mathematics degrees from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

and

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

Childhood and education

Gustafson was raised in

Des Moines, Iowa Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, ...

. After completing a degree in Applied Mathematics at

in 1977 he moved to

Ames, Iowa Ames () is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States, located approximately north of Des Moines in central Iowa. It is best known as the home of Iowa State University (ISU), with leading agriculture, design, engineering, and veterinary medici ...

and completed his M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1982) at

. His mother was an electronics technician at Collins Radio and his father was a chemical engineer turned MD, both as a result of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. His parents encouraged his scientific explorations at a young age. Assembling radio transmitters, designing and executing chemistry experiments, and making holograms are some of his favorite childhood explorations.

Unums

Gustafson has devised a new format for storing real numbers in computers use a variable number of bits depending on the number of digits required, called

number format. Normal formats store numbers as a fixed number of bits, for example 64 bits is usual for

double-precision floating-point format Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Fl ...

numbers. This can allow them to be smaller than doubles for fast processing and also more precise or larger than the limits for double when desirable.

Awards and honors

In 1988, Gustafson was the recipient of the inaugural

Gordon Bell Prize The Gordon Bell Prize, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing, is an award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the Supercomputing Conferen ...

. He has received other awards for his work in HPC, including the International Atanasoff Award (2006). He was awarded the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award in 2007. Other awards and honors include: * 2000 Iowa State University Inventor of the Year Award * 1998 Distinguished Visiting Professor, New Mexico State University * 1997 PDPTA Outstanding Achievement Award * 1995

R&D 100 Award Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...

* 1991 R&D 100 Award * 1990 New Mexico Inventor of the Year Award * 1989 R&D 100 Award * 1977 Richter Fellowship * 1974 Eric Temple Bell Award * 1973 Drake Physics Prize

References

External links

Links to papers published while at Ames Lab

Posithub.org: The one-stop hub for all unum and posit materialsJohn L. Gustafson Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gustafson, John L. 1955 births Living people American computer businesspeople American computer scientists Computer hardware engineers IBM Fellows Businesspeople from Des Moines, Iowa Iowa State University alumni California Institute of Technology alumni American technology chief executives American chief technology officers Inventors from Iowa