Honoring Distinguished CS&E Alum Arvind
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) distinguished alumni Arvind Mithal passed away on June 17, 2024. Arvind, who went by the mononym, was 77 years old. A dual alumni of the University of Minnesota, Arvind earned his master’s degree and PhD in computer science from the University of Minnesota in 1972 and 1973, respectively. He earned the Distinguished Alumni Award from CS&E in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Achievement Award from the U of M in 2008.
"Professor Arvind was one of the early pioneers in high-performance computer architecture and system design,” said Pen-Chung Yew, professor and former CS&E department head. “His work on Dataflow Machine that includes the design of its programming language, compiler, and system architecture was extremely innovative and had a significant impact on high-performance computer architectures.''
Arvind was a prolific researcher, dedicated teacher and academic leader in computer architectures, parallel computing, and digital design, enabling faster and more efficient computation. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for nearly five decades, and also served as the head of the faculty of computer science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He led the Computation Structures Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, and was well-known for his contributions to dataflow computing. He was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2008. He also received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award from IEEE in 2012, which honors significant contributions to theory or practice in the information processing field. He is considered to be one of the most notable pioneers and practitioners in the computer science field, especially in the field of computer architecture. His contributions have influenced the design of microprocessors in almost all computers in use today.
Join us in honoring the life and work of Arvind. His full obituary is published on the MIT website.