Congratulations to David Patterson – 2016 Tapia Award Winner

Former CRA Board Chair David Patterson was recently named the recipient of the 2016 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing.

From the citation:

The Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing is awarded yearly to an individual who demonstrates significant leadership, commitment and contributions to diversifying computing. Dr. David Patterson has been selected as the 2016 Richard A. Tapia Award recipient.

Dr. David Patterson grew up in Southern California body surfing and listening to the Beach Boys, who were a local band. He was the first of his family to graduate from college, earning three degrees from UCLA before joining UC Berkeley in 1976. Thus, his whole world since he was a teenager has been large public universities.

His most successful projects have likely been Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Network of Workstations (NOW). All three projects helped lead to multibillion-dollar industries. This research led to many papers and six books, with the best-known book being Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, co-authored by John Hennessy, and the most-recent book being Engineering Software as a Service, co-authored by Armando Fox. His current research is open source computer architecture (RISC-V) and hardware for computer security.

In the past, he served as Director of the Parallel Computing Lab, Director of the Reliable And Distributed Systems Lab, Chair of UC Berkeley’s CS Division, Chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He was General Chair of Tapia 2011, serves on its steering committee, and supports large UC Berkeley contingents that attend the conferences.

Patterson will be presented with the Richard A. Tapia Award at the Tapia Conference on September 16, 2016.