David Andrew Patterson (born November 16, 1947) is an American

computer pioneer This is a list of people who made transformative breakthroughs in the creation, development and imagining of what computers could do. Pioneers : ''To arrange the list by date or person (ascending or descending), click that column's small "up-do ...

and academic who has held the position of professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at

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. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on estab ...

Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Patterson is noted for his pioneering contributions to reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design, having coined the term RISC, and by leading the

Berkeley RISC Berkeley RISC is one of two seminal research projects into reduced instruction set computer (RISC) based microprocessor design taking place under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency '' Very Large Scale Integration'' (VLSI) VLSI Project. ...

project. As of 2018, 99% of all new chips use a RISC architecture. He is also noted for leading the research on redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (

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) storage, with Randy Katz. His books on computer architecture, co-authored with

John L. Hennessy John Leroy Hennessy (born September 22, 1952) is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as Chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as t ...

, are widely used in computer science education. Hennessy and Patterson won the 2017

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...

for their work in developing RISC.

Early life and education

David Patterson grew up in

Evergreen Park, Illinois Evergreen Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. In 2020, the population was 19,943. History As early as 1828, a German farming family had settled in the area of what is now Evergreen Park. In the succeeding decades, other Ge ...

. He attended the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

(UCLA), receiving his

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

degree in Mathematics in 1969. He continued on to obtain his

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast t ...

degree in 1970 and PhD in 1976, both in Computer Science at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

. Patterson's PhD was advised by David F. Martin and

Gerald Estrin Gerald Estrin (September 9, 1921 – March 29, 2012) was an American computer scientist, and professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department. He is known for his work on the organization of computer systems, on parallel processing and SARA ...

Research and career

Patterson is an important advocate and developer of the concept of

reduced instruction set computing In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set compu ...

and coined the term "RISC". He led the

project from 1980, with Carlo H. Sequin, where the technique of

register window In computer engineering, register windows are a feature which dedicates registers to a subroutine by dynamically aliasing a subset of internal registers to fixed, programmer-visible registers. Register windows are implemented to improve the perf ...

s was introduced. He is also one of the innovators of the redundant arrays of independent disks (

) together with Randy Katz and Garth Gibson. Patterson also led the Network of Workstations (NOW) project at Berkeley, an early effort in the area of computer clustering.

Past positions

Past chair of the Computer Science Division at U.C. Berkeley and the

Computing Research Association The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

, he served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. President (PITAC) during 2003–05 and was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 2004–06.

Notable PhD students

He has advised several notable Ph.D. students, including: * David Ditzel, founder and former president of

Transmeta Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software. Code Morphing ...

* Garth A. Gibson, co-inventor of redundant array of inexpensive disks (

), founder and CTO of Panasas, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and first president and chief executive officer of the Vector Institute * Christos Kozyrakis, professor at Stanford University * David Ungar, designer of the

Self The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhoo ...

programming language, and currently researcher at

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...

* Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Grace Wahba professor and Chair of Computer Sciences at UW-Madison. * Robert Yung, CTO of

PMC-Sierra PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces. On January 15, 2016, ...

Selected publications

Patterson co-authored seven books, including two with

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

: ''Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach'' (6 editions—latest is ) and ''Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: the Hardware/Software Interface'' (5 editions—latest is ). They have been widely used as

textbook A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbook ...

s for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990. His most recent book is with Andrew Waterman on the

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 500 and Apple IIe have an open architecture supp ...

: ''The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas (1st Edition)'' (). His articles include: * * * *

Awards and honors

Patterson's work has been recognized by about 35 awards for research, teaching, and service, including Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and by election to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

, National Academy of Sciences, and the

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2005, he and Hennessy shared Japan's Computer & Communication award and, in 2006, he was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

and the National Academy of Sciences and received the Distinguished Service Award from the

. In 2007 he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for fundamental contributions to engineering education, advances in computer architecture, and the integration of leading-edge research with education." That same year, he was also named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2008, he won th
ACM Distinguished Service Award
th
ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award
and was recognized by the School of Engineering at

for Alumni Achievement in Academia. Since then he has won the ACM-SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, ACM-SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and the 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing from IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. In 2016 he was given the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing. For 2020 he was awarded the

BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards () are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ...

in Information and Communication Technologies. In 2013, he set the American Powerlifting Record for the state of California for his weight class and age group in bench press, dead lift, squat, and all three combined lifts. On February 12, 2015, IEEE installed a plaque at UC Berkeley to commemorate the contribution of RISC-I in Soda Hall at UC Berkeley. The plaque reads: * ''IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering'' * First RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Microprocessor *''UC Berkeley students designed and built the first VLSI reduced instruction-set computer in 1981. The simplified instructions of RISC-I reduced the hardware for instruction decode and control, which enabled a flat 32-bit address space, a large set of registers, and pipelined execution. A good match to C programs and the Unix operating system, RISC-I influenced instruction sets widely used today, including those for game consoles, smartphones and tablets. On March 21, 2018, he was awarded the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award together with

for developing RISC. The award attributed them for pioneering "a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry". In 2022 he was awarded the

Charles Stark Draper Prize The U.S. National Academy of Engineering annually awards the Draper Prize, which is given for the advancement of engineering and the education of the public about engineering. It is one of three prizes that constitute the "Nobel Prizes of Enginee ...

by the

alongside

, Steve Furber and

Sophie Wilson Sophie Mary Wilson (born Roger Wilson; June 1957) is an English computer scientist, who helped design the BBC Micro and ARM architecture. Wilson first designed a microcomputer during a break from studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She ...

for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips.

Charitable work

From 2003 to 2012 he rode in the annual Waves to Wine MS charity event as part of Bike MS; a 2-day cycling adventure. He was the top fundraiser in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Patterson, David A. Computer designers American computer scientists 1947 births Living people Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Presidents of the Association for Computing Machinery Scientists from California Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty University of California, Los Angeles alumni People from Evergreen Park, Illinois 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Computer science educators Turing Award laureates