William James Dally (born August 17, 1960) is an American computer scientist and educator. Since 2021, he has been a member of the

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a council, chartered (or re-chartered) in each administration with a broad mandate to advise the president of the United States on science and technology. The current PCAST w ...

(PCAST).

Microelectronics

He developed a number of techniques used in modern interconnection networks including routing-based deadlock avoidance,

wormhole routing Wormhole flow control, also called wormhole switching or wormhole routing, is a system of simple flow control in computer networking based on known fixed links. It is a subset of flow control methods called Flit-Buffer Flow Control. Switching is ...

, link-level retry, virtual channels, global adaptive routing, and high-radix routers. He has developed efficient mechanisms for communication, synchronization, and naming in parallel computers including message-driven computing and fast capability-based addressing. He has developed a number of stream processors starting in 1995 including Imagine, for graphics, signal, and Image processing, and Merrimac, for scientific computing. He has published over 200 papers as well as the textbooks "Digital Systems Engineering" with John Poulton, and "Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks" with Brian Towles. He was inventor or co-inventor on over 70 granted patents. An author quoted him saying: "Locality is efficiency, Efficiency is power, Power is performance, Performance is king".

Career

Bell Labs

Dally received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six re ...

. While working for

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

he contributed to the design of the

Bellmac 32 The Bellmac 32 is a microprocessor developed by Bell Labs' processor division in 1980, implemented using CMOS technology and was the first microprocessor that could move 32 bits in one clock cycle. The microprocessor contains 150,000 transistors ...

, an early 32-bit microprocessor, and earned an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1981. He then went to the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

(Caltech), graduating with a

Ph.D. degree A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

in 1986. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM simulation engine and an integrated circuit for routing. While at Caltech, he was part of the founding group of Stac Electronics in 1983.

MIT

From 1986 to 1997 he taught at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

where he and his group built the J–Machine and the M–Machine, parallel machines emphasizing low overhead synchronization and communication. During his MIT times he claims to have collaborated on developing design of

Cray T3D The T3D (''Torus, 3-Dimensional'') was Cray Research's first attempt at a massively parallel supercomputer architecture. Launched in 1993, it also marked Cray's first use of another company's microprocessor. The T3D consisted of between 32 and 204 ...

and

Cray T3E The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a ful ...

supercomputers. He became the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the

Stanford University School of Engineering Stanford University School of Engineering is one of the schools of Stanford University. The current dean is Jennifer Widom, the former senior associate dean of faculty affairs and computer science chair. She is the school's 10th dean. List of ...

and chairman of the computer science department at Stanford. Dally's corporate involvements include various collaborations at Cray Research since 1989. He did Internet router work at Avici Systems starting in 1997, was chief technical officer at Velio Communications from 1999 until its 2003 acquisition by

LSI Logic LSI Logic Corporation, an American company founded in Milpitas, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in data center ...

, founder and chairman of Stream Processors, Inc until it folded.

Nvidia and IEEE fellow

Dally was elected a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

in 2002, and a Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

, also in 2002. In 2003 he became a consultant for NVIDIA for the first time and helped to develop GeForce 8800 GPUs series. He received the ACM/SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2000, the Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award in 2004, and the

IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award In 1989, the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium established the Charles Babbage Award to be given each year to a conference participant in recognition of exceptional contributions to the field. In almost all cases, the awa ...

in 2006. In 2007 he was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

. In January 2009 he was appointed chief scientist of

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. He worked full-time at Nvidia, while supervising about 12 of his graduate students at Stanford. In 2009, he was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

for contributions to the design of high-performance interconnect networks and parallel computer architectures. He received the 2010 ACM/IEEE

Eckert–Mauchly Award The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. It is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and Jo ...

for "outstanding contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks and parallel computers."

Books

*Dally and Poulton, ''Digital Systems Engineering'', 1998, . *Dally and Towles, ''Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks'', 2004, . *Dally and Harting, ''Digital Design: A Systems Approach'', 2012, .

References

External links

Stanford Faculty Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dally, Bill American computer scientists American technology writers Computer systems researchers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE Stanford University School of Engineering faculty 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