About the Authors
DAVID A. PATTERSON was the first in his family to graduate from college (1969 A.B UCLA), and he enjoyed it so much that he didn’t stop until a PhD (1976 UCLA). He joined U.C. Berkeley in 1977. He spent 1979 at DEC working on the VAX minicomputer. He and colleagues later developed the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). In 1984 Sun Microsystems recruited him to start the SPARC architecture. In 1987, Patterson and colleagues tried building dependable storage systems from the new PC disks. This led to the popular Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). He spent 1989 working on the CM-5 supercomputer. Patterson and colleagues later tried building a supercomputer using standard desktop computers and switches. The resulting Network of Workstations (NOW) project led to cluster technology used by many Internet services. He is currently Director of both the RAD Lab and the ParLab. In the past, he served as Chair of Berkeley’s CS Division, Chair of the CRA, and President of the ACM. All this resulted in 200 papers, 5 books, and about 30 honors, some shared with friends, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He was named Fellow of the Computer History Museum and both AAAS organizations. From the University of California he won the Outstanding Alumnus Award (UCLA Computer Science Department) and the Distinguished Teaching Award (Berkeley). As a fellow of the ACM he received the SIGARCH Eckert–Mauchly Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time Award, the Distinguished Service Award, and the Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. He is also a fellow at the IEEE, where he received the Johnson Information Storage Award, the Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the Mulligan Education Medal. Finally, Hennessy and he shared the IEEE von Neumann Medal and the NEC C&C Prize.
JOHN L. HENNESSY is the president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. He received the 2001 Eckert–Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and shared the John von Neumann Award in 2000 with David Patterson. After completing the Stanford MIPS project in 1984, he took a one-year leave from the university to cofound MIPS Computer Systems, which developed one of the fi rst commercial RISC microprocessors. After being acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1991, MIPS Technologies became an independent company in 1998, focusing on microprocessors for the embedded marketplace. Millions of MIPS microprocessors have been shipped in devices ranging from video games and palmtop computers to laser printers and network switches. Hennessy’s more recent research at Stanford focuses on the area of designing and exploiting multiprocessors. He helped lead the design of the DASH multiprocessor architecture, the first distributed shared-memory multiprocessors supporting cache coherency, and the basis for several commercial multiprocessor designs, including the Silicon Graphics Origin multiprocessors. Since becoming president of Stanford, revising and updating this text and the more advanced Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has become a primary form of recreation and relaxation.
