Anton Gunzinger (born 8 May 1956, Welschenrohr, Switzerland) is a Swiss electrical engineer and entrepreneur. He was a developer of high-performance parallelized computers. [1]
Anton Gunzinger first did an apprenticeship as a radio electrician, followed by vocational secondary school and the technical college in Biel. He then studied electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and graduated as an electrical engineer in 1983. This was followed by an assistant position at the Institute of Electronics with Walter Guggenbühl and the preparation of a doctoral thesis entitled Synchronous Data Flow Computer for Real-Time Image Processing. He received his Ph.D. with it in 1989. [2]
Gunzinger presented a parallel computer consisting of 18 processors connected in parallel in 1990: the Synchronous Data Flow Machine, or Sydama, as part of a system for real-time image processing. For his work on Sydama, Gunzinger won the 100,000 Swiss franc prize of the de Vigier Foundation for the Promotion of Young Swiss Entrepreneurs. [3]
As a senior assistant at ETH Zurich, he and his team developed the MUltiprocessor System with Intelligent Communication (MUSIC system). This computer system with several interconnected processors and a performance of 3.6 gigaflops (billion floating point operations per second) was one of the most powerful computers in the world at the time. [3] With MUSIC, he participated as a finalist for the Gordon Bell Award of the AMC and IEEE at the 1992 Supercomputing conference in Minneapolis in competition with the most well-known manufacturers of supercomputers, came in second behind Intel, and was honored for his efforts. As a result, Time magazine selected Gunzinger as one of the 100 upcoming leaders worldwide in 1994. [4]
In 1993, together with a business economist, he founded the company Supercomputing Systems AG in the Technopark Zurich with the aim of developing low-cost supercomputers. [5] More than 20 years later, his company is still successful, [6] with customized products being developed in a wide range of competence areas since about 1997. [7] Gunzinger was awarded a doctorate by the ETH Zurich. [8]
ETH Zurich awarded Gunzinger the title of professor in 2002, where he lectured on computer architectures in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. [8]
Gunzinger is committed to an orientation of energy technology without nuclear power plants and reduction of the use of fossil fuels. [4] [9] He regrets the relatively slow progress in the transformation of energy production in accordance with the Energy Strategy 2050. [10]
He took a position on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland: in his view, consistent, comprehensive protection of at-risk groups (six percent of the total population), especially the over-80s, would be sufficient to lift restrictions for everyone else. [11] Gunzinger advocated a sweep of the under-80s, which could end the pandemic within one to two months-without overloading hospitals. In his view, the COVID-19 pandemic was as bad as the 2015 flu epidemic. [12]
Richard Robert Ernst was a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel laureate.
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Raffaello D’Andrea a Canadian-Italian-Swiss engineer, artist, and entrepreneur. He is professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich. He is a co-founder of Kiva Systems, and the founder of Verity. He was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four time world champions at the annual RoboCup competition. He is a new media artist, whose work includes The Table, the Robotic Chair, and Flight Assembled Architecture.
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Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimisation and on artificial software diversity. He is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, and Director of UCI's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory.
Ursula Keller is a Swiss physicist. She has been a physics professor at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland since 2003 with a speciality in ultra-fast laser technology, an inventor and the winner of the 2018 European Inventor Award by the European Patent Office.
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Gabriela Hug-Glanzmann is a Swiss electrical engineer and an associate professor and Principal Investigator of the Power Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich within the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Hug studies the control and optimization of electrical power systems with a focus on sustainable energy.
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