Bill Dally
William James Dally | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 17, 1960 United States |
| Occupation(s) | Computer scientist, academic, executive |
| Years active | 1980s–present |
| Known for | Interconnection networks, parallel computing architectures, GPU research |
| Notable work | Digital Systems Engineering; Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks |
William James Dally (born August 17, 1960) is a distinguished American computer scientist and academic. He currently holds the position of chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia. Previously, he served as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at both Stanford University and MIT. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Microelectronics
Dally has been instrumental in advancing fundamental methods within modern interconnection networks. His innovations include routing-based deadlock avoidance, wormhole routing, link-level retry mechanisms, the development of virtual channels, global adaptive routing strategies, and high-radix router architectures. He also designed effective communication, synchronization, and naming methods tailored for parallel computing systems, such as message-driven computation and rapid capability-based addressing. Starting in 1995, he led the creation of various stream processors, notably Imagine for graphics and signal processing applications, as well as Merrimac aimed at scientific computation.
He has published more than 200 research articles and authored two textbooks: Digital Systems Engineering with John Poulton, and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks co-written with Brian Towles. Dally is credited with holding or co-holding upwards of 70 patents.
Bell Labs
Dally obtained his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech. During his tenure at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he played a key role in designing the Bellmac 32, one of the early 32-bit microprocessors. He completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1981. Subsequently, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Caltech in 1986, where he developed the MOSSIM simulation engine along with an integrated circuit dedicated to routing functions. While at Caltech, he was among the founding members of Stac Electronics in 1983.
MIT
Between 1986 and 1997, Dally was a faculty member at MIT. There, his research group created the J–Machine and M–Machine parallel computing systems emphasizing minimal synchronization overhead and efficient communication. He also contributed to the architecture of Cray T3D and T3E supercomputers. Later on, he was appointed the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor and served as chair of Stanford’s computer science department for twelve years before transitioning to Nvidia.
His industry involvement includes partnerships with Cray Research starting in 1989, developing Internet routers at Avici Systems from 1997 onward, serving as CTO at Velio Communications until its acquisition by LSI Logic in 2003, and founding Stream Processors, Inc., where he acted as chairman.
Nvidia and IEEE Fellow
In 2002, Dally was honored as a Fellow by both the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE. Beginning consultancy work with Nvidia in 2003, he contributed to the development of the GeForce 8800 GPU series. His accolades include the ACM/SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award (2000), Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award (2004), and IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award (2006). In 2007, he gained election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Named chief scientist at Nvidia in 2009, Dally also holds the role of Senior Vice President overseeing Nvidia Research. He has pioneered optical interconnect technologies for GPUs and computing platforms utilizing micro ring modulators with multiple wavelength channels, facilitating high-bandwidth yet energy-efficient optical links that significantly boost GPU performance and AI computational effectiveness.
That same year, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering for his influential work on high-performance interconnect networks and parallel computing architectures. In 2010, he received the ACM/IEEE Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizing exceptional contributions to interconnection networks and parallel computers.
In 2025, Dally was among the recipients of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey E. Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Jen-Hsun Huang, and Fei-Fei Li.
Personal life
Dally is a family man, married with three children. In 1992, while piloting his Cessna 210 from Hanscom Field, Massachusetts to Farmingdale, New York, he encountered an oil leak amid adverse weather conditions. This emergency led to a forced water landing in the Long Island Sound, where he was subsequently saved by a nearby sailboat.
Works
- Digital Design: A Systems Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
- Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks (Elsevier, 2004)
- Digital Systems Engineering (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
External links
- American computer scientists
- American technology writers
- Computer systems researchers
- 2002 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Fellows of the IEEE
- Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty
- Stanford University Department of Computer Science faculty
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
- California Institute of Technology alumni
- Virginia Tech alumni
- Stanford University School of Engineering alumni
- Living people
- Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award recipients
- Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
- American electrical engineers
- Nvidia people
- 1960 births
- Maurice Wilkes Award winners