The Abacus Award is presented to an individual who, over a period of several years, has provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing and information disciplines.

Upsilon Pi Epsilon is pleased to present the 2006 Abacus Award to Dr. David A. Patterson, world-renowned computer scientist and educator who has touched the academic lives of most of the world’s computing sciences students.

Professor Patterson receives the 2006 UPE Abacus Award for “outstanding service to students of the computing sciences, for revealing the mystery of computer architecture, both in design and performance, through text, lecture, and discovery, to a generation of students of computing worldwide. “

Professor Patterson has been a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and is currently President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  In addition, he holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

His work led to the design and implementation of RISC I — research which became the foundation of the SPARC architecture. He was a leader of the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) project and has been involved in the Network of Workstations (NOW) project, which led to cluster technology used by many Internet companies.

His current research interests are in building novel microprocessors using Intelligent DRAM for use in portable multimedia devices, and in Recovery Oriented Computing to provide Internet services computers that are highly available, easily maintained, and gracefully evolve.

He has consulted for several companies, is on the advisory board of many others, and is the co-author of five books.

Truly – he has touched the lives of thousands of students worldwide.

Professor Patterson and Board Members of UPE.