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Dave Patterson

Dave Patterson

David Patterson received BA, MS, and PhD degrees from UCLA. He is a UC Berkeley Pardee professor emeritus, a Google distinguished engineer since 2016, the RIOS Laboratory Director, and the RISC-V International Vice-Chair.

His most influential Berkeley projects likely were RISC and RAID. He received service awards for his roles as ACM President, Berkeley CS Division Chair, and CRA Chair and awards for his teaching. The most prominent of his seven co-authored books is Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

He and his co-author John Hennessy shared the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award, the 2021 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and the 2022 NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering. The Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” and the Draper Prize is considered a “Nobel Prize of Engineering.”

Outside of work he plays soccer, lifts weights, cycles, and bodysurfs. He has been married to his high-school sweetheart since 1967, and they have raised two sons, who in turn are raising four grandchildren.

Authored Publications
Google Publications
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    Preview abstract Many recent papers highlight the importance of thinking about carbon emissions (CO2e) in machine learning (ML) workloads. While elevating the discussion, some early work was also based on incomplete information. (Unfortunately, the most widely cited quantitative estimate that was the basis for many of these papers was off by 88X.) Inspired by these concerns, we looked for approaches that would make ML training considerably less carbon intensive. We identified four best practices that dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and demonstrate two concrete examples of reducing CO2e by 650X over four years and 40X over one year by following them. Provided ML stakeholders follow best practices, we predict that the field will bend the curve of carbon footprint increases from ML training runs to first flatten and then reduce it by 2030 without sacrificing the current rate of rapid advances in ML, contrary to prior dire warnings that ML CO2e will soar. View details
    In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit
    Norman P. Jouppi
    Nishant Patil
    Gaurav Agrawal
    Raminder Bajwa
    Sarah Bates
    Suresh Bhatia
    Nan Boden
    Al Borchers
    Rick Boyle
    Pierre-luc Cantin
    Clifford Chao
    Chris Clark
    Jeremy Coriell
    Mike Daley
    Matt Dau
    Ben Gelb
    Tara Vazir Ghaemmaghami
    Rajendra Gottipati
    William Gulland
    Robert Hagmann
    C. Richard Ho
    Doug Hogberg
    John Hu
    Dan Hurt
    Julian Ibarz
    Aaron Jaffey
    Alek Jaworski
    Alexander Kaplan
    Harshit Khaitan
    Andy Koch
    Naveen Kumar
    Steve Lacy
    James Law
    Diemthu Le
    Chris Leary
    Zhuyuan Liu
    Kyle Lucke
    Alan Lundin
    Gordon MacKean
    Adriana Maggiore
    Maire Mahony
    Kieran Miller
    Rahul Nagarajan
    Ravi Narayanaswami
    Ray Ni
    Kathy Nix
    Thomas Norrie
    Mark Omernick
    Narayana Penukonda
    Andy Phelps
    Jonathan Ross
    ISCA (2017) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)---deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs (caches, out-of-order execution, multithreading, multiprocessing, prefetching, ...) that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X - 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X - 80X higher. Moreover, using the GPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU. View details
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