Arvind (computer scientist)

Arvind Mithal (usually referred to as just Arvind) is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008.[1]

Career

Arvind's research interests include verification of large-scale digital systems using Guarded Atomic Actions, Memory Models and Cache Coherence Protocols for parallel architectures and languages.[2]

Past work was instrumental in the development of dynamic dataflow architectures, the parallel programming languages, Id and pH; and the compilation of these types of languages on parallel machines.[2]

Arvind earned his Bachelor's degree in technology (with an emphasis in Electrical Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, in 1969. He discovered in the process of earning his degree that he was keenly interested in computers. Subsequently, Arvind earned his Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1972, and he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1973.[3]

Arvind conducted thesis research in operating systems on mathematical models of program behavior. At the University of California, Irvine, where he taught from 1974 to 1978,[2] he became interested in computer architecture and languages.[3]

Arvind then taught at IIT's Kanpur campus in 1977 and 1978.[2]

He served as the Chief Technical Advisor to the United Nations' sponsored, Knowledge Based Computer Systems project in India from 1986 to 1992. During 1992–93, he was the Fujitsu Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo.

In 1992, Arvind and his CSAIL team collaborated with Motorola in completing the Monsoon dataflow machine and associated software. A dozen Monsoons were installed at Los Alamos National Labs and other universities before Monsoon was retired to the Computer Museum in California. In 2000, Arvind took two years off from teaching at MIT to build Sandburst, a fabless semiconductor company. He served as its president until he returned to MIT in 2002. In 2003, he co-founded Bluespec Inc, an EDA company. He currently serves on the boards of both companies.

In 2006, Sandburst, headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts and providing semiconductor solutions for scalable packet switching and routing systems, was acquired by Broadcom Corp.[4]

Bluespec, Inc., headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, manufactures silicon-proven electronic design automation synthesis toolsets.[5]

He served as the General Chair for the International Conference on Supercomputing held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in June, 2005.

Arvind was the first to occupy the N. Rama Rao Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He served as chair from 1998 to 1999. Also during this time he taught a few weeks each semester at the CSE department of IIT, Kanpur.[6]

Arvind's current research uses a formalism known as Term Rewriting Systems (TRS's) for high-level specification and description of architectures and protocols. In the Computation Structures Group at MIT, which he heads, work is being done on using TRS's to design hardware more quickly and allow for exploration of designs.

Published works

Along with R. S. Nikhil, Arvind published the book Implicit parallel programming in pH in 2001. "pH" is a programming language based on Haskell with special support for parallel processing.

Among the most significant and/or recent articles he authored or co-authored that have been published:

Arvind has also served on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and the Journal of Functional Programming.

Awards

Arvind has received the following awards: Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Minnesota (2001), Distinguished Alumnus Award, I.I.T. Kanpur (1999) and the IEEE Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award (1994) and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota.[7]

Additionally he was selected as an IEEE Fellow in 1994 and an ACM Fellow. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and is currently a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.[7]

References

  1. ↑ "National Academies News". National Academies.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "CSAIL, MIT". MIT.
  3. 1 2 "UMN News". University of Minnesota.
  4. ↑ "Sandburst Corporation". Bloomberg Businessweek.
  5. ↑ "About Bluespec". Bluespec.
  6. ↑ "N. Ramo Rao Chair Professor". IIT, Kanpur.
  7. 1 2 "CSAIL Arvind Biography". MIT.
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