Gunnar Wolf: The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research

This post is an unpublished review

for The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research

David Patterson does not need an introduction. Being the brain behind many
of the inventions that shaped the computing industry (repeatedly) over the
past 40 years, when he put forward an opinion article in Communications of
the ACM targeting the current day political waves in the USA, I could not
avoid choosing it to write this review.

Patterson worked for a a public university (University of California at
Berkeley) between 1976 and 2016, and in this article he argues how
government-funded academic research (GoFAR) allows for faster, more
effective and freer development than private sector-funded research would,
putting his own career milestones as an example of how public money that
went to his research has easily been amplified by a factor of 10,000:1 for
the country’s economy, and 1,000:1 particularly for the government.

Patterson illustrates this quoting five of the “home-run” research projects
he started and pursued with government funding, eventually spinning them
off as successful startups:

• RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing): Microprocessor
  architecture that reduces the complexity and power consumption of CPUs,
  yielding much smaller and more efficient processors.
• RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks): Patterson experimented
  with a way to present a series of independent hard drive units as if they
  were a single, larger one, leading to increases in capacity and
  reliability beyond what the industry could provide in single drives, for
  a fraction of the price.
• NOW (Network Of Workstations): Introduced what we now know as
  computer clusters (in contrast of large-scale massively multiprocessed
  cache-coherent systems known as “supercomputers”), which nowadays power
  over 80% of the Top500 supercomputer list and are the computer platform
  of choice of practically all data centers.
• RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Lab): Pursued the
  technology for data centers to be self-healing and self-managing, testing
  and pushing early cloud-scalability limits
• ParLab (Parallel Computing Lab): Given the development of massively
  parallel processing inside even simple microprocessors, this lab explores
  how to improve designs of parallel software and hardware, presenting the
  ground works that proved that inherently parallel GPUs were better than
  CPUs at machine learning tasks. It also developed the RISC-V open
  instruction set architecture.

Patterson identifies principles for the projects he has led, that are
specially compatible with the ways research works at universitary systems:
Multidisciplinary teams, demonstrative usable artifacts, seven- to ten-year
impact horizons, five-year sunset clauses (to create urgency and to lower
opportunity costs), physical proximity of collaborators, and leadership
followed on team success rather than individual recognition.

While it could be argued that it’s easy to point at Patterson’s work as a
success example while he is by far not the average academic, the points he
makes on how GoFAR research has been fundamental for the advance of
science and technology, but also of biology, medicine, and several other
fields are very clear.