The Parallel Revolution Has Started: Are You Part of the Solution or Part of...

Google Tech Talks December 18, 2008 ABSTRACT This talk will explain * Why the La-Z-Boy era of sequential programming is over * The sorry record of prior commercial forays in parallelism * The implications to the IT industry if the parallel revolution should fail * The opportunities and pitfalls of this revolution * What Berkeley is doing in general to be at the forefront of this revolution * Roofline, A New Insightful Visual Performance Model for Multicore Computers Speaker: David Patterson, Director of the Par Lab, U.C. Ber David Andrew Patterson (born November 16, 1947) is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. A native of Evergreen Park, Illinois, David Patterson attended UCLA, receiving his A.B. in 1969, M.S. in 1970 and Ph.D. (advised by David F. Martin and Gerald Estrin) in 1976. He is one of the original innovators of the widely used Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) (in collaboration with Carlo H. Sequin), Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) (in collaboration with Randy Katz), 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 200305 and was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 200406. He 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 (3 editions—latest is ISBN 1-55860-604-1). 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. In 2005 he and Hennessy shared Japan's Computer & Communication award and, in 2006, 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, 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. Since 2003 he has riden in the annual Waves to Wine charity event as part of Bike MS; he was the top fundraiser in 2006, 2007, and 2008. David Patterson's projects in 200708 have been the RAD Lab: Reliable Adaptive Distributed systems, RAMP: Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors, and the Parallel Computing Laboratory.