David A. Patterson has been teaching computer architecture at the University of
California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977, where he holds the Pardee Chair
of Computer Science. His teaching has been honored by the Distinguished Teaching
Award from the University of California, the Karlstrom Award from ACM, and the
Mulligan Education Medal and Undergraduate Teaching Award from IEEE. Patterson
received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award and the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award
for contributions to RISC, and he shared the IEEE Johnson Information Storage Award
for contributions to RAID. He also shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and
the C & C Prize with John Hennessy. Like his co-author, Patterson is a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Computer History Museum, ACM,
and IEEE, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National
Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He served on
the Information Technology Advisory Committee to the U.S. President, as chair of the
CS division in the Berkeley EECS department, as chair of the Computing Research
Association, and as President of ACM. is record led to Distinguished Service Awards
from ACM and CRA.
A t B e r k e l e y, P a t t e r s o n l e d t h e d e s i g n a n d i m p l e m e n t a t i o n o f R I S C I , l i k e l y t h e rst
VLSI reduced instruction set computer, and the foundation of the commercial
SPARC architecture. He was a leader of the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks
(RAID) project, which led to dependable storage systems from many companies.
He was also involved in the Network of Workstations (NOW) project, which led to
cluster technology used by Internet companies and later to cloud computing. ese
projects earned three dissertation awards from ACM. His current research projects
are Algorithm-Machine-People and Algorithms and Specializers for Provably Optimal
Implementations with Resilience and E ciency. e AMP Lab is developing scalable
machine learning algorithms, warehouse-scale-computer-friendly programming
models, and crowd-sourcing tools to gain valuable insights quickly from big data in
the cloud. e ASPIRE Lab uses deep hardware and so ware co-tuning to achieve the
highest possible performance and energy e ciency for mobile and rack computing
systems.
John L. Hennessy is the tenth president of Stanford University, where he has been
a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and
computer science. Hennessy is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM; a member of the
National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, and the American
Philosophical Society; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among his many awards are the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to
RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and the 2000
John von Neumann Award, which he shared with David Patterson. He has also received
seven honorary doctorates.
In 1981, he started the MIPS project at Stanford with a handful of graduate students.
A er completing the project in 1984, he took a leave from the university to cofound
MIPS Computer Systems (now MIPS Technologies), which developed one of the rst
commercial RISC microprocessors. As of 2006, over 2 billion MIPS microprocessors have
been shipped in devices ranging from video games and palmtop computers to laser printers
and network switches. Hennessy subsequently led the DASH (Director Architecture
for Shared Memory) project, which prototyped the rst scalable cache coherent
multiprocessor; many of the key ideas have been adopted in modern multiprocessors.
In addition to his technical activities and university responsibilities, he has continued to
work with numerous start-ups both as an early-stage advisor and an investor.
