Agarwal was born in Mangalore and did his schooling in St. Aloysius Mangalore. He holds a bachelor's degree (1982) in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras.[4] For postgraduate study, he attended Stanford University, where he received an MS (1984) and a PhD (1987), both in electrical engineering.[2][5][6][7] His PhD thesis, Analysis of Cache Performance for Operating Systems and Multiprogramming, was written under John L. Hennessy.[8]
Career
Agarwal is the CEO of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard. He is a leader of the Carbon Project, which is developing new scalable multicore architectures, a new operating system for multicore and clouds called fos, and a distributed, parallel simulator for multicore and clouds called Graphite. He is a leader of the Angstrom Project, which is creating fundamental technologies for exascale computing.[9] He contributes to WebSim, a web-based electronic circuits laboratory. He led the Raw Project at CSAIL, and is a founder of Tilera Corporation. Raw was an early tiled multicore processor with 16 cores. He also teaches the edX offering of MIT's 6.002 Circuits and Electronics.
In 2013, he was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.
His previous projects include Sparcle, a coarse-grain multithreaded (CGMT or switch-on-event SOE) microprocessor, Alewife, a scalable distributed shared memory multiprocessor, Virtual Wires, a scalable FPGA-based logic emulation system, LOUD, a beamforming microphone array, Oxygen, a pervasive human-centered computing project, and Fugu, a protected, multiuser multiprocessor.
