David Patterson (computer scientist)

This article is about the American computer scientist. For other spellings and people of the same name, see David Patterson (disambiguation).

David Patterson
File:David A Patterson.jpg
Born	(1947-11-16) November 16, 1947 Evergreen Park, Illinois
Nationality	American
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	UCLA
Thesis	Verification of Microprograms (1976)
Doctoral advisor	David F. Martin Gerald Estrin
Doctoral students	Garth A. Gibson David Ungar
Known for	RISC RAID Network of Workstations
Notable awards	Eckert–Mauchly Award (2008) ACM Distinguished Service Award (2007) Computer History Museum Fellow (2007) National Academy of Engineering Member National Academy of Sciences Member AAAS Fellow ACM Fellow (1994) IEEE Fellow Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1991)

David Andrew Patterson (born November 16, 1947) is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976.

Patterson is noted for his pioneering contributions to RISC processor design, having coined the term RISC, and by leading the Berkeley RISC project. He is also noted for his research on RAID disks.

His books on computer architecture (co-authored with John L. Hennessy) are widely used in computer science education.

Background

A native of Evergreen Park, Illinois, David Patterson attended UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1969, M.S. in 1970 and Ph.D. (advised by David F. Martin and Gerald Estrin) in 1976.

Research and Academic Contributions

He is an important proponent of the concept of Reduced Instruction Set Computer and coined the term "RISC". He led the Berkeley RISC project from 1980 and onwards along with Carlo H. Sequin, where the technique of register windows was introduced. He is also one of the innovators of the Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) (in collaboration with Randy Katz and Garth Gibson), and Network of Workstations (NOW) (in collaboration with Eric Brewer and David Culler).

Past Positions

Past chair of the Computer Science Division at U.C. Berkeley and the Computing Research Association, he served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. President (PITAC) during 2003–05 and was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 2004–06.

Selected works

Books

He co-authored six books, including two with John L. Hennessy on computer architecture: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (5 editions—latest is ISBN 0-12-383872-X) and Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface (5 editions—latest is ISBN 978-0-12-407726-3). They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990. His most recent book is with Armando Fox on software engineering: Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Approach Using Cloud Computing (1st Edition) (ISBN 0-98-488124-7).

Awards

His work has been recognized by about 35 awards for research, teaching, and service, including Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as well as by election to the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2005 he and Hennessy shared Japan's Computer & Communication award and, in 2006, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Computing Research Association. In 2007 he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for fundamental contributions to engineering education, advances in computer architecture, and the integration of leading-edge research with education." That same year he was also named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2008, won the ACM Distinguished Service Award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and was recognized by the School of Engineering at UCLA for Alumni Achievement in Academia. Since then he has won the ACM-SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, ACM-SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and the 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing from IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.

In 2013 he set the American Powerlifting Record for the state of California for his weight class and age group in bench press, dead lift, squat, and all three combined lifts.

On February 12, 2015, IEEE installed a plaque at UC Berkeley to commemorate the contribution of RISC-I in Soda Hall at UC Berkeley. The plaque reads:

• IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering
• First RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Microprocessor
• UC Berkeley students designed and built the first VLSI reduced instruction-set computer in 1981. The simplified instructions of RISC-I reduced the hardware for instruction decode and control, which enabled a flat 32-bit address space, a large set of registers, and pipelined execution. A good match to C programs and the Unix operating system, RISC-I influenced instruction sets widely used today, including those for game consoles, smartphones and tablets.
• February 2015

Charity

From 2003 to 2012 he rode in the annual Waves to Wine MS charity event as part of Bike MS; a 2-day cycling adventure. He was the top fundraiser in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. In total, he has raised more than $200,000 for Multiple Sclerosis.

Recent Work

David Patterson's recent projects have been the RAD Lab: Reliable Adaptive Distributed systems, the Par Lab: Parallel Computing Laboratory, the AMP Lab: Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory, and the ASPIRE Lab: Algorithms and Specializers for Provably optimal Implementations with Resilience and Efficiency Laboratory.

Ph.D. Students

He has advised a number of notable Ph.D. candidates, including:

• David Ditzel, founder and former president of Transmeta
• Garth A. Gibson, co-inventor of RAID, founder and CTO of Panasas, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University
• David Ungar, designer of the Self programming language, and currently researcher at IBM Research
• Robert Yung, CTO of PMC-Sierra

References

• Who's Who in America 2008. New Providence, New Jersey: Marquis Who's Who. ISBN 978-0-8379-7010-3

External links

• David A. Patterson page at the website of the University of California, Berkeley
• List of David A. Patterson's students who graduated with PhD