Anant Agarwal

Professor of Computer Science; President. Made three game-changing contributions to the field of computer architecture, both in academia and industry. In the early 1990s, he (with his students) designed and implemented the Alewife computer. Alewife was the first parallel computer with scalable cache-coherent shared memory and integrated message passing. It contributed novel protocols for maintaining coherence in hardware, variations of which are found in any multicore computer. He founded Virtual Machine Works, which commercialized his VirtualWires technology. VirtualWires is an idea that allows an FGPA to multiplex a pin among several virtual wires. VirtualWires is now a standard idea in the FPGA industry. He was the founder of Tilera, which commercialized his idea of tiled multicore processors: a processor containing several identical cores connected by a mesh network, collaborating to provide cache-coherent shared memory. All processors today are becoming multicore processors, and adopting scalable interconnects. He has been widely recognized for these ideas that at the time of inception seemed bold and daring. Anant currently serves as the president of edX.