Dr. David Andrew Patterson is a world-renowned computer scientist whose pioneering work has fundamentally shaped modern computing architecture. He holds the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus position at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for four decades after joining in 1976, and currently serves as a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google. Born in Evergreen Park, Illinois in 1947, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from UCLA in 1969 followed by Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Computer Science in 1970 and 1976 respectively. His career transition from academia to industry in 2016 marked a significant milestone, as he continued his influential work while becoming Vice Chair of the board of directors for the RISC-V Foundation. Throughout his distinguished career, Patterson has maintained a commitment to integrating teaching with research and fostering strong industry-academia partnerships.
Patterson's most transformative contribution came through his leadership of the Berkeley RISC project from 1982 to 1983, during which he coined the term RISC and established the foundational principles of Reduced Instruction Set Computer architecture. His work on RISC design revolutionized processor development, with an estimated 99% of all new chips incorporating RISC architecture as of 2018, including virtually all smartphones and IoT devices. Collaborating with Randy Katz between 1989 and 1993, he pioneered the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) technology that dramatically improved disk system speed and reliability, becoming a standard in virtually all web servers worldwide. Patterson co-authored with John L. Hennessy the seminal textbook Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, which has educated generations of computer scientists and engineers. In recognition of his foundational contributions, he and Hennessy received the prestigious 2017 Turing Award, often considered the Nobel Prize of Computing.
Patterson's influence extends beyond his technical contributions through his leadership roles as President of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2004 to 2006 and his service on numerous advisory boards shaping the direction of computing research. He has been honored with election to both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and recognition as a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE Computer Society. His research methodology of identifying critical industry challenges and assembling interdisciplinary teams has consistently produced demonstration systems that evolve into billion-dollar industries. Currently at Google, Patterson is advancing domain-specific computer architectures for machine learning, continuing his lifelong mission of creating practical computing solutions with broad impact. His ongoing work with the RISC-V Foundation aims to make the open instruction set architecture as ubiquitous for hardware development as Linux is for operating systems.
