Michael J. Flynn

Proposer of Flynn's Taxonomy, a landmark classification of computer architectures developed in 1966, Flynn also served as Design Manager of prototype versions of the IBM 7090 and 7094/II. He joined IBM in 1955, and for ten years worked in the areas of computer organization and design, later serving as Design Manager for the System 360 Model 91 Central Processing Unit. He was an American Professor Emeritus at Stanford University in California.

Born in New York City, he received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Manhattan College, New York, N.Y. in 1955 and his M.S. degree from Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y., in 1960. He earned his Ph.D. from Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana in 1961.

Between 1966 and 1974 Flynn was a faculty member of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then became Professor of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. From 1973 to 1975, he took a leave of absence to be a co-founder with Maxwell Paley of Palyn Associates, a San Jose, California based computer design firm where he served as Vice-President. In 1975 he became Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and was Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory from 1977 to 1983.

He was founding Chairman of both the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA). In 2014 Flynn became Chairman of Maxeler Technologies, Inc. With offices in London and Palo Alto, Calif., Maxeler was the leading provider of dataflow computers which had proven especially valuable in high performance computing markets such as finance and geophysics.

He was the recipient of numerous awards including, in 1992, the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award "for his technical contributions to computer and digital systems architecture". Flynn was the 1995 recipient of the IEEE-CS Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in recognition of "his outstanding contribution to the design and classification of computer architecture". In 1998 he received the Tesla Medal from the International Tesla Society (Belgrade). He was awarded the IEEE Computer Society's 2015 Computer Pioneer Award, "for more than 50 years of leadership, which includes the creation of TCCA and SIGARCH, basic contributions to computer arithmetic, microarchitecture and multiprocessing, and quantitative analysis of microarchitectures."

He received an honorary Doctor of Science from Trinity College (University of Dublin), Ireland. In 2009, Flynn received an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade in Serbia. He also published over 250 technical papers.

He was the author of three books: "Computer architecture: pipelined and parallel processor design", Boston, MA: Jones and Bartlett, ISBN 0-86720-204-1 (1995); "Some Computer Organizations and Their Effectiveness", IEEE Transactions on Computing C-21, No. 9, Sep 1972, pp. 948–960; and "A Survey of Parallel Computer Architectures", Duncan, Ralph, IEEE Computer, Feb 1990, pp. 5–16 (2003-05-29).