Olukotun joined Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering in 1991. In 2000 he founded Afara Websystems, Inc., a company that designed and manufactured low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was purchased by Sun Microsystems, Inc. in 2002. While at Sun, Olukotun was one of the architects of the 2005 UltraSPARC T1 processor. From 2002 to 2017, he was a visiting professor at Oracle's Processor and Network Products. In 2017 Olukotun and Chris Ré founded SambaNova Systems. SambaNova Systems is developing a next-generation computing platform to power machine learning and data analytics.
Research
Olukotun's research focus is in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems, domain specific languages, and high-level compilers. Olukotun lead the Stanford Hydra chip multiprocessor research project, revolutionizing computing by bringing multi-core technology to consumers and high-end computing systems. In the mid-1990s, Olukotun and his co-authors argued that multi-core computer processors were likely to make better use of hardware than existing superscalar designs. In 2008, Olukotun returned to Stanford, and founded the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory at Stanford after gathering US$6M in funding from several computer-industry corporations. His recent work focuses on domain-specific programming languages that can allow algorithms to be easily adapted to multiple different types of parallel hardware including multi-core systems, graphics processing units, and field-programmable gate arrays. Olukotun is also a member of the board of advisors of UDC, a Nigerian venture capital firm. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2006 for his "contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi threaded processor design". He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008. Olukotun has used several words from his Yoruba heritage in his research. Afara, the name of the company he founded, means "bridge" in the Yoruba language, and he has named his server at Stanford Ogun after the Yoruba god of iron and steel, a play on words since large computers are frequently called big iron. Olukotun directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab which seeks to proliferate the use of parallelism in all application areas. He is also a member of the Data Analytics for What's Next Lab. Kunle holds 12 U.S. patents. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and wrote two textbooks.
S. W. Keckler, K. Olukotun, and H. P. Hofstee, Multicore Processors and Systems.
K. Olukotun, L. Hammond, J. Laudon, Chip Multiprocessor Architecture: Techniques to Improve Throughput and Latency, Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture.
