Bill Dally — Chief Scientist

Bill Dally joined NVIDIA in January 2009 as chief scientist, after spending 12 years at Stanford University, where he was chairman of the computer science department. Dally and his Stanford team developed the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today.

Dally was previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1986 to 1997, where he and his team built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanism from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. From 1983 to 1986, he was at California Institute of Technology (CalTech), where he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip, which pioneered “wormhole” routing and virtual-channel flow control.

Dally is a cofounder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of two textbooks.

He received a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, a master’s in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a PhD in Computer Science from CalTech.