Arvind's research interests included
formal verification of large-scale
digital systems using guarded
atomic actions,
memory models, and
cache coherence protocols for
parallel computing architectures and
programming languages. Past work was instrumental in the development of dynamic
dataflow architectures, two parallel languages,
Id and
pH, and the
compiling of such languages on parallel machines. Arvind conducted his thesis research in
operating systems on mathematical models of program behavior. At the
University of California, Irvine, where he taught from 1974 to 1978, 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 Laboratory and other universities before Monsoon was retired to the
Computer History Museum in California. In 2000, Arvind took two years off from teaching at MIT to build Sandburst, Inc, a
fabless manufacturing semiconductor company. He served as its president until his return to MIT in 2002. In 2006, Sandburst was acquired by
Broadcom Corporation. In 2003, he cofounded
Bluespec, Inc., headquartered in
Waltham, Massachusetts. They produce proven
electronic design automation (EDA) synthesis toolsets. With
Lennart Augustsson, Arvind codeveloped the
programming language Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV), a high-level
functional programming hardware description language, which is a
Haskell variant extended to handle chip design and
electronic design automation in general. He also worked with the Bluespec-related language
Minispec. Arvind was the first to occupy the N. Rama Rao Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT. 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. Arvind's later research used
term-rewriting systems (TRSs) for high-level specification and description of architectures and protocols. The Computation Structures Group at MIT, which he headed, uses TRSs to design faster hardware and allow for more exploration of designs. ==Death==