Oyekunle Ayinde (Kunle) Olukotun is the Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and director of the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory. His research interests include computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems, domain specific languages, and high-level compilers.
Early years
Olukotun did his undergraduate studies at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, MI. He earned an MS (1987) and PhD (1991) from University of Michigan, in Computer Science and Engineering. His advisor was Trevor N. Mudge. Olukotun joined Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering in 1991. In 2000 he founded Afara Websystems, Inc., a company that designed and manufactured low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was purchased by Sun Microsystems, Inc. in 2002. While at Sun, Olukotun was one of the architects of the 2005 UltraSPARC T1 processor. From 2002 to 2017, he was a visiting professor at Oracle’s Processor and Network Products. In 2017 Olukotun and Chris Ré founded SambaNova Systems. SambaNova Systems is developing a next-generation computing platform to power machine learning and data analytics.
