David Andrew Patterson

One of the innovators of Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID), Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic. A native of Evergreen Park, Illinois, he attended UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1969, M.S. in 1970, and Ph.D. (advised by David F. Martin and Gerald Estrin) in 1976. He joined the University of California, Berkeley as Professor of Computer Science in 1977.

Patterson has been an important proponent of the concept of Reduced Instruction Set Computer and coined the term "RISC." He led UC Berkeley's RISC project from 1980 onwards along with Carlo H. Sequin, where the technique of register windows was introduced. He was also one of the innovators of the Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) (in collaboration with Randy Katz and Garth Gibson), and Network of Workstations (NOW) (in collaboration with Eric Brewer and David Culler).

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. Patterson co-authored five books, including two with John L. Hennessy on computer architecture: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (4 editions—latest is ISBN 0-12-370490-1) and Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface (4 editions—latest is ISBN 0-12374-493-8). Both volumes have been widely used as textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990.

His work has been recognized by approximately 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 election to the National Academy of Engineering and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2005, he and Hennessy shared Japan's Computer & Communication award, and in 2006 Patterson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Computing Research Association. In 2007, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In 2008, he won the ACM Distinguished Service Award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and was recognized by the School of Engineering at UCLA for Alumni Achievement in Academia. His projects in 2007–08 included the RAD Lab: Reliable Adaptive Distributed systems, RAMP: Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors, and the Parallel Computing Laboratory.

From 2003, Patterson rode in the annual Waves to Wine MS charity event as part of Bike MS, and served as the top fundraiser in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.