Gene Amdahl Tree - Sunnyvale, California
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DougK
N 37° 22.807 W 121° 59.513
10S E 589251 N 4137518
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, particularly the Amdahl Corporation.
Waymark Code: WMQEHP
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 02/16/2016
Views: 2
This Cherry tree was dedicated to Dr. Gene Amdahl on Feb 15, 2016 in front of the headquarters building at what was Gene’s Amdahl Corporation.
Gene started out his career with the IBM corporation, where he was the chief architect of the IBM System/360.
Wikipedia tells us about Gene’s early career:
At IBM, Amdahl worked on the IBM 704, the IBM 709, and then the Stretch project, the basis for the IBM 7030. He left IBM in December 1955, but returned in September 1960 (after working at Ramo-Wooldridge and at Aeronutronic). He quit out of frustration with the bureaucratic structure of the organization.
On his return he became chief architect of IBM System/360 and was named an IBM Fellow in 1965, and head of the ACS Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. He left IBM again in September 1970, after his ideas for computer development were rejected, and set up Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, California with aid from Fujitsu.
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, 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 a US$1 billion[citation needed] of V6 and V7 mainframes and had over 6,000 employees worldwide.
Gene formulated Amdahl's law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing. The law states that there is a theoretical upper bound on the speed-up of a single program as a result of parallelization.
In 1989 the IEEE Computer Society was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award.