The Driver of the Digital Fast Lane

"Speed is exchangeable for almost anything. 
Any computer can emulate any other at some speed."
- Burton Smith

Burton J. Smith's career had a very rough start. Smith, born in 1941 in Chapel Hill, NC, moved with his family to New Mexico when his father, a professor of chemistry, was offered at job as the head of the University of New Mexico's chemistry department. Smith was constantly fascinated by technology, but only after he came back from the military did he know what exactly he wanted to do - design of electronic devices. Therefore, he graduated in 1968 with a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico and went on to MIT where he completed his doctorate in 1972. A lot of Smith's work from then on was focused on optimizing the hardware structures that support the newly implemented pipelining process - both pipeline parallelism and multiprocessor parallelism - used in computation. Smith and his colleagues at Denelcor, a small computing company based in Denver, Colorado, strove to create a supercomputer which would employ high-efficient parallel processing. In other words, they wanted "to design a machine that would perform and operation as soon as its inputs were ready" (180). They called this approach, which was first developed by Jack Dennis of MIT in the 1970s, "dataflow architecture" (180). After some time in development, it was clear that this approach has a very significant impact on the discipline, as dataflow architecture is also applied to digital memories and networks of all kinds, just to name a few. Smith's success eventually followed him to the Tera Computer Company in Seattle, WA where he had another revelation that boosted performance of the pipelining process - "different operations within a task may sometimes be executed out of order" (186). This idea significantly sped up data processing in computers and ultimately led us to the modern-day process.