Anton Gunzinger (born 8 May 1956,

Welschenrohr Welschenrohr (French: ''Rosières'') is a former municipality in the district of Thal in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland. On 1 January 2021 the former municipalities of Gänsbrunnen and Welschenrohr merged to form the new municipality of ...

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) is a Swiss

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

. He was a developer of high-performance parallelized computers.

Life

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 Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and graduated as an

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. 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. 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. With MUSIC, he participated as a finalist for the

Gordon Bell Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as ...

Award of the

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and

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

at the 1992 Supercomputing conference in

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in competition with the most well-known manufacturers of supercomputers, came in second behind

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, and was honored for his efforts. As a result,

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selected Gunzinger as one of the 100 upcoming leaders worldwide in 1994. 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. More than 20 years later, his company is still successful, with customized products being developed in a wide range of competence areas since about 1997. Gunzinger was awarded a doctorate by the ETH Zurich. ETH Zurich awarded Gunzinger the title of professor in 2002, where he lectured on

computer architectures In computer science and computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a mo ...

in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Gunzinger is committed to an orientation of energy technology without nuclear power plants and reduction of the use of fossil fuels. He regrets the relatively slow progress in the transformation of energy production in accordance with the Energy Strategy 2050. He took a position on the management of the

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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. 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.

Awards

* 1986: ETH Zurich Innovation Prize * 1989:

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996)
– was an American

Swiss businesspeople Academic staff of ETH Zurich Swiss electrical engineers 1956 births Living people ETH Zurich alumni