University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus Gene Amdahl (M.S.'49, Physics; Ph.D.'52, Mathematics and Physics), a pioneer in computer science, died earlier this week in Palo Alto, Calif., at the age of 92.
Gene Amdahl speaks at a 2008 UW-Madison Department of Computer Sciences alumni reception in San Jose, Calif. (Photo courtesy Perry Kivolowitz, Wikimedia Commons)
Amdahl, who grew up on a farm in South Dakota and went on to design groundbreaking mainframe computer systems for IBM, studied theoretical physics as a graduate student at UW-Madison. His Ph.D. thesis was titled "The Logical Design of an Intermediate Speed Digital Computer." In it, he proposed a design for the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer, a device that was completed by subsequent graduate students in 1955.
"Gene Amdahl inspired generations in my field of computer architecture due to his influential computer designs at IBM and Amdahl Corporation,” says Department of Computer Sciences chair Mark D. Hill. Hill holds a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation professorship that he named after Amdahl with the late computer scientist's blessing.
Mainframe computers that the visionary thinker Amdahl designed "still make the banks of the world hum," in Hill's words.
One of Amdahl's innovations was to design a family of computers that all ran the same software. Up until that point, a new machine meant new software, a situation that rapidly became unsustainable as both hardware and software grew in power and complexity. With Amdahl's approach, companies could upgrade to more powerful machines without having to master new software.
Amdahl's work has also impacted the classroom.
"Amdahl's biggest influence on students today is his deep insight flowing from simple rules such as Amdahl's Law," notes Hill. The law predicts the theoretical maximum improvement in speed using multiple processors to handle a task.
"It's an elegant law for guiding the use of parallel computers and computer optimization in general," says Hill.