Olukotun has been a researcher in and proponent of CMP technology since the early 1990's. Olukotun led the Stanford Hydra single-chip multiprocessor research project which was the first microprocessor with multiple processors on a single silicon chip and support for thread-level speculation. Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop commercial server systems with significant performance/watt advantages using CMP technology. At Afara, Olukotun was chief scientist and the co-architect of the 8-core, 32-thread SPARC-based CMP. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems. The Afara microprocessor technology, now called Niagara (UltraSPARC T1), is at the core of Sun's "Throughput Computing" initiative. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel system design. Olukotun received his Ph.D. from The University of Michigan.