David Patterson is a computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977.
David is one of the original innovators of the widely used Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID), and Network of Workstations (NOW). Past chair of the Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley and the Computing Research Association,
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.
David co-authored five books, including two with John L. Hennessy on computer architecture: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach and Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface. They have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990. His work has been recognized by about 30 awards for research, teaching, and service, including Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as well as by election to the National Academy of Engineering and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame.
My favorite toy growing up:
I was pretty fond of my Official Davy Crockett's Coonskin Cap and Old Betsy, his frontiersman's rifle.
The engineer or technologist who inspired me most:
Fred Brooks, Jr.: A great computer architect, software engineer, writer, teacher, and gentleman who is a caring and thoughtful family man and colleague.
The contribution for which I most want to be remembered:
Leading multidisciplinary groups of faculty and students to significant achievements
What I value in a technical collaborator:
Hardworking
What I wish I had invented:
Internet Search Engines - helping make a billion people smarter by making it easy to find answers to the world's questions
How I define beauty in engineering:
Simplicity, the rarest of the engineering elements
My favorite quotation:
"For better or for worse, benchmarks shape a field"
My favorite book or movie:
"High Noon" in a tie with "Last of the Mohicans"
My favorite fictional hero or heroine:
See above: Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in a tie with Chingachgook (Russell Means)
My favorite hobby, sport, or pastime:
Bodysurfing or soccer, depending on the season
A talent I wish I had:
Sleeping soundly
Something few people know about me:
a. On my 50th birthday, I bench-pressed 325 pounds
b. For the last 3 years I've been the top fundraiser for the "Waves to Wine" charity bike ride of the Northern California Multiple Sclerosis Society
Something that (always) makes me laugh:
Watching "The Play," the last 4 seconds of the 1982 Big Game where Cal football players triumph over long odds (and the Stanford Band)
My favorite source of technology news:
(The recently resuscitated) Communications of the ACM
What I appreciate most in a computer system:
Dependability
My first experience with parallel computing:
My first research project as a new assistant professor, which was called X-tree
The most important problem to solve for multicore software:
Making it as easy as sequential programming to write efficient, correct, portable software that can also scale as the number of cores doubles every two years
My worst fear about how multicore technology might evolve:
We fail to take advantage of the once-in-a-career opportunity to fix many old IT flaws while reinventing the hardware-software stack to solve the multicore challenge.
What computer-science students should learn that their professors don't teach them:
How to first become a great teammate and then how to form and lead great teams
My dream about the future of computing:
Everyone on the planet can have a great education
A question I wish had been on the list, and my answer:
Q: What are the most important contributions of a professor's career?
A: Students are the coin of the academic realm