Anant Agarwal is an Indian computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT), where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent

multiprocessor Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

, and has been director of the

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

. He is the founder and CTO of Tilera, a

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design. He is the CEO of

edX edX is an American For-profit higher education in the United States, for-profit massive open online course provider. It was founded by MIT and Harvard. It is a subsidiary of 2U (company), 2U. History edX was founded in May 2012 by the admi ...

, a joint partnership between MIT and

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

that offers free online learning.

Education

Agarwal was born in Mangalore and did his schooling in St. Aloysius Mangalore. He holds a bachelor's degree (1982) in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. For postgraduate study, he attended

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he received an MS (1984) and a PhD (1987), both in electrical engineering. His PhD thesis, ''Analysis of Cache Performance for Operating Systems and Multiprogramming'', was written under John L. Hennessy.

Career

Agarwal is the CEO of

, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard. He is a leader of the Carbon Project, which is developing new scalable multicore architectures, a new operating system for multicore and clouds called fos, and a distributed, parallel simulator for multicore and clouds called Graphite. He is a leader of the Angstrom Project, which is creating fundamental technologies for exascale computing. He contributes to WebSim, a web-based electronic circuits laboratory. He led the Raw Project at CSAIL, and is a founder of Tilera Corporation. Raw was an early tiled multicore processor with 16 cores. He also teaches the edX offering of MIT's 6.002 Circuits and Electronics. In 2013, he was elected as a member into the

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

for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures. His previous projects include Sparcle, a coarse-grain multithreaded (CGMT or switch-on-event SOE) microprocessor, Alewife, a scalable distributed shared memory multiprocessor, Virtual Wires, a scalable FPGA-based logic emulation system, LOUD, a beamforming microphone array, Oxygen, a pervasive human-centered computing project, and Fugu, a protected, multiuser multiprocessor.

Awards

Agarwal received the 2001 Maurice Wilkes Award for computer architecture. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

. In 2011 he was appointed Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2013, he became a member of the

and was appointed the CEO of EdX. In March 2016, he was awarded the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education in higher education as an outstanding leader of the development of the Massive Open Online Course movement. In addition to that, he is also a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras. He received Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India in 2017. In 2018, he received the Yidan Prize for Education Research, the world's largest education award, i.e. USD four million.

Publications

References

External links

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"Why massive open online courses (still) matter" (TED2013)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Agarwal, Anant MIT School of Engineering faculty 2007 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Indian Institutes of Technology alumni Living people Scientists from Mangalore Stanford University School of Engineering alumni 1959 births Maurice Wilkes Award winners Yidan Prize laureates Recipients of the Padma Shri in literature and education