David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of
Computer Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, which
he joined after graduating from UCLA in 1976. Dave's research style is to
identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary
groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. The answer is typically
embodied in demonstration systems, and these demonstration systems are later
mirrored in commercial products. In addition to research impact, these projects
train leaders of our field. The best known projects were Reduced Instruction
Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks
of Workstations (NOW), each of which helped lead to billion dollar industries.
A measure of the success of projects is the list of awards won by Patterson and
as his teammates: the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the C & C Prize, the IEEE von
Neumann Medal, the IEEE Johnson Storage Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time award,
the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the Katayanagi Prize. He was also
elected to both AAAS societies, the National Academy of Engineering, the
National Academy of Sciences, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and
to be a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. The full list includes about 40
awards for research, teaching, and service. In his spare time he coauthored
seven books—including two with John Hennessy who is past President of Stanford
University and with whom he shared the Turing Award— Patterson also served as
Chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Computing
Research Association, and President of ACM. He is currently Vice-Chair of the
Board of Directors of the RISC-V Foundation.