David Patterson

David Patterson holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science at UC - Berkeley, where he has taught computer architecture since 1977. Over his career, he has emphasized the integration of teaching with research and the fostering of ties between industry and academia. These ties have proven critical to the rapid adoption of many of his department's and students' innovations. In 1982-3, Patterson led the RISC project, a collaboration between UC-Berkeley and the ARPA VLSI project. This project, which explored improving computer speed by using simpler but faster processors, led to working microprocessor designs (RISC I and RISC II) and became the foundation of the highly-influential SPARC micro-architecture from Sun Microsystems. Since then, nearly every other computer company has followed RISC-based product strategies. Between 1989 and 1993, Patterson and Berkeley colleague Randy Katz, led the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) project which resulted in vast improvements in disk system speed and reliability were obtained. Nearly every web server in the world now uses some form of RAID. Along with Eric Brewer, Tom Anderson and David Culler, Patterson was a leader of the 1997 Network of Workstations (NOW) project in which clustered computers were connected together through an extremely high-speed switch to achieve supercomputer performance using commercial workstations. In 1999-2000, with Kathy Yelick he led the Berkeley ISTORE project, a highly-available, self-maintaining, self-tuning back-end server system for storage-intensive network services. He now leads the RAD Lab at Berkeley, a research program devoted to Reliable, Adaptive and Maintainable computers and systems. Patterson was made an ACM Fellow in 1994 and served as its president from 2004 - 2006. He is also a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2000 he and longtime colleague John Hennessy of Stanford were awarded the IEEE John von Neumann medal for "creating a revolution in computer architecture through their exploration, popularization, and commercialization of architectural innovations." Patterson holds an A.B. in mathematics (1969), and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science (1970, 1976) all from U.C.L.A.