David A. Patterson is retiring from UC Berkeley after a distinguished career spanning four decades.

The recipient of multiple awards for teaching excellence, including 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, Prof. Patterson has taught computer science at UC Berkeley since 1977. With John L. Hennessy, President of Stanford University, he is the coauthor of two critically acclaimed and widely adopted Morgan Kaufmann textbooks, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface.

Prof. Patterson says that in his retirement he’ll be “open to interesting new challenges,” and that beginning in July 2016, his plan is to “graduate his remaining students, coach interested faculty, consult, travel, play soccer on Sundays, and attend the free faculty lunch on Mondays.” Fortunately for readers of Computer Architecture and Computer Organization and Design, he also plans to continue revising those texts!

During his career, Prof. 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. Prof. 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. This record led to Distinguished Service Awards from ACM, CRA, and SIGARCH.

At UC Berkeley, Prof. Patterson led the design and implementation of RISC I, likely the first 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. These 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 Efficiency. The 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. The ASPIRE Lab uses deep hardware and software co-tuning to achieve the highest possible performance and energy efficiency for mobile and rack computing systems.

Elsevier wishes Prof. Patterson well on today, his birthday, as he enters this next chapter of his life.

Read more on Prof. Patterson’s passing of the baton here.

About the Book

David Patterson is co-author of the upcoming (2016) new edition of Computer Organization and Design: ARM Edition, which is available for pre-order on the Elsevier Store.

Use discount code “STC215” at checkout and save up to 30% on your very own copy!