John Gustafson

Dr. John L. Gustafson (born January 19, 1955) Gustafson was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. After completing a degree in Applied Mathematics at California Institute of Technology in 1977 he moved to Ames, Iowa and completed his M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1982) at Iowa State University. Dr. Gustafson is an American computer scientist and businessman, chiefly known for his work in High Performance Computing (HPC) such as the invention of Gustafson's Law, introducing the first commercial computer cluster, measuring with QUIPS, leading the reconstruction of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, and several awards for computer speedup.

Dr. Gustafson previously held the positions of Senior Fellow and Chief Product Architect at AMD in Sunnyvale, CA, Director at Intel Labs-SC, CEO of Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. and CTO at ClearSpeed Technology. Since November 2013, he has been CTO of Ceranovo, Inc.

Dr. Gustafson has recently finished writing a book, The End of Error: Unum Computing, that presents a new approach to computer arithmetic: the unum. The universal number, or unum format, encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This approach obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power. The book is published by Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science, ISBN-13: 978-1482239867.