Education
California Institute of Technology.
California Institute of Technology.
Currently he is the Chief Technology Officer at Ceranovo, Incorporated. pushing the limits of ceramic capacitors. He was the Chief Graphics Product Architect and Senior Fellow at AMD from September 2012 until June 2013, and he previously held the distinguished positions of Director of Intel Labs-South Carolina, Chief Executive Officer of Massively Parallel Technologies, Incorporated. and Chief Technology Officer at ClearSpeed Technology. Doctor Gustafson holds applied mathematics degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Iowa State University.
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 Master of Surgery (1981) and Doctor of Philosophy (1982) at Iowa State University. His mother was an electronics technician at Collins Radio and his father was a chemical engineer turned Doctor of Medicine, both as a result of World World War World War II Assembling radio transmitters, designing and executing chemistry experiments, and making holograms are some of his favorite childhood explorations adding up to over 1000 lab hours before college.
Gustafson devised a new format for storing real numbers as a series of binary bits in computers. Normal formats store numbers as a fixed number of bits, for example 64 bits is usual for double-precision floating-point format numbers. on the other hand use a variable number of bits depending on the number of digits required.
This can allow them to be smaller than doubles for fast processing and also more precise or larger than the limits for double when desirable.