Patented application of linear algebra

I just found out Brian Beckman and I got a patent on work we did for GSI Technology [1]. Nearly all the work I do is under an NDA, so I don't often get a chance to talk about my projects. This work is public now that it's in a patent; I suppose it has been public since the application was published.

Brian did most of the work on the project. My contribution was to mathematically formalize low-level operations on sheets of bits using linear algebra over a binary field. Lots of Hadamard products and outer products, if I remember correctly. When you can reduce computations to algebra, you can prove that a sequence of operations is correct, and you can find optimizations by simplifying expressions.

The patent mentions a programming language called Tartan. I suggested calling it plaid because it used matrices with mask patterns that reminded me of a plaid pattern, and Brian countered saying we should call it Tartan. I like that name better.

Figure 5B from the patent.

[1] Brian Beckman and John D. Cook. Compiler for a parallel processor. U.S. Patent 12,717,871 B2. Applicant/Assignee: GSI Technology Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.

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