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Gene Myron Amdahl (November 16, 1922 – November 10, 2015) was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. He formulated Amdahl's law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.
He went on to study theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under Robert G. Sachs. However, in 1950, Amdahl and Charles H. "Charlie" Davidson, a fellow PhD student in the Department of Physics, approached Prof. Harold A. Peterson with the idea of a digital computer. Amdahl and Davidson gained the support of Peterson and fellow electrical engineering professor Vincent C. Rideout, who encouraged them to build a computer of their unique design. Amdahl completed his doctorate at UW–Madison in 1952 with a thesis titled A Logical Design of an Intermediate Speed Digital Computer and created his first computer, the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC). He then went straight from Wisconsin to a position at IBM in June 1952.
On his return, he became the chief architect of IBM System/360 and was named an IBM Fellow in 1965, and head of the Advanced Computing Systems Laboratory (ACS) in Menlo Park, California.
Competing with IBM in the mainframe market, the company manufactured "Plug compatible" mainframes, shipping its first machine in 1975 – the Amdahl 470V/6, a less expensive, more reliable and faster replacement for the System 370/168. By purchasing an Amdahl 470 and plug-compatible peripheral devices from third-party manufacturers, customers could now run S/360 and S/370 applications without buying actual IBM hardware. Amdahl's software team developed VM/PE (Virtual Machine/Performance Enhancement), software designed to optimize the performance of IBM's MVS operating system when running under IBM's VM operating system.
By 1979, Amdahl Corporation had sold over US$1 billion of V6 and V7 mainframes and had over 6,000 employees worldwide. The corporation went on to distribute an IBM-plug-compatible front-end processor (the 4705) as well as high-performance Disk storage, both jointly developed with Fujitsu engineers.
At the 1967 Spring Joint Computer Conference, Amdahl, along with three other computer architects, most notably ILLIAC IV architect Daniel Slotnick, engaged in a discussion on future architectural trends. Amdahl articulated his arguments, both orally and in three written pages, on the fundamental physical limitations that he theorized would govern the performance of any special feature or mode introduced to new machines. This set of arguments resulted in two, major and lesser, "laws" of computer performance regarding sequential versus parallel processing. These arguments continue to this day.
Amdahl co-founded Commercial Data Servers in 1996, again in Sunnyvale, and again developing mainframe-like machines but this time with new super-cooled processor designs and aimed at physically smaller systems. One such machine, from 1997, was the ESP/490 (Enterprise Server Platform/490), an enhancement of IBM's P/390 of the System/390 family. Since then, CDS has changed its name and narrowed its focus. As Xbridge Systems, the company now builds software to scan mainframe datasets and database tables for sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security and other government identification numbers, sensitive medical diagnosis information that can be linked to an individual, and other information such as that needed for electronic discovery.
In November 2004, Amdahl was appointed to the board of advisors of Massively Parallel Technologies.
He died on November 10, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, from pneumonia, six days shy of his 93rd birthday. He also had Alzheimer's disease in the last years of his life.
Amdahl was elected Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 1979, and in 1983 he was awarded the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award by the IEEE Computer Society "in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the design, applications and manufacture of large-scale high-performance computers."
In 1998, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his fundamental work in computer architecture and design, project management, and leadership."
In November 2007, Amdahl was recognized with the SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award. A banquet dinner in his honor featured a short talk by Amdahl on his career, and a panel debate on the future of parallel processing. Panelists included John Gustafson (known for Gustafson's law). The talk and debate were both videotaped, and are available through the SIGDA Web page, and the ACM Digital Library.
(2025). 9781450347426 ISBN 9781450347426
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Categories: 1922 Births, 2015 Deaths, American Computer Businesspeople, American Physicists, Computer Hardware Engineers, Ibm Employees, Ibm Fellows, People From Flandreau, South Dakota, American People Of Norwegian Descent, American People Of Swedish Descent, Fellows Of The British Computer Society, South Dakota State University Alumni, Members Of The United States National Academy Of Engineering, Deaths From Pneumonia In California, United States Navy Personnel Of World War Ii
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