[15] In 2000, he founded Afara Websystems,[16] a company that designed and manufactured high-throughput, low power processors for server systems with chip multiprocessor technology.

Niagara derived processors currently power all Oracle SPARC-based servers and have generated billions of dollars of revenue.

SambaNova Systems is developing a next-generation computing platform to power machine learning and data analytics.

[19] 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.

[21] 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.

[13] 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".