Dr. William Dally is a preeminent computer scientist and visionary leader in high-performance computing architecture who currently serves as Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation. Following his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, he earned a master's degree from Stanford University while working at Bell Laboratories, where he contributed to the design of the Bellmac 32 microprocessor. He then completed his PhD in computer science from Caltech in 1986, where he designed the pioneering Torus Routing chip that introduced wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control. Dr. Dally subsequently held professorial positions at MIT for 11 years and Stanford University for 12 years, serving as chairman of Stanford's computer science department from 2005 to 2009 before joining NVIDIA full-time in 2009. His distinguished academic career included groundbreaking work on parallel computer systems that established foundational principles for modern high-performance computing.
Dr. Dally's seminal contributions to computer architecture have fundamentally transformed the landscape of parallel processing and accelerated computing. His development of the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization technology now forms the backbone of most large-scale parallel computers worldwide. His pioneering work in stream processing during the late 1990s at Stanford evolved into NVIDIA's G80 architecture with the CUDA programming language, which laid the essential groundwork for GPU computing and has become central to modern artificial intelligence infrastructure. This innovation has enabled the AI revolution by providing the computational power necessary for training complex neural networks, with NVIDIA GPUs now powering the majority of the world's fastest AI systems. His additional contributions to optical interconnects using micro ring modulators have further advanced datacenter efficiency through high-bandwidth, low-energy communication systems.
Beyond his technical contributions, Dr. Dally has played a pivotal role in shaping the direction of computing research through leadership positions and mentorship. He has built NVIDIA Research into a world-class industrial research laboratory encompassing machine learning, graphics, computer vision, and numerous other cutting-edge fields while maintaining connections to academia through adjunct positions. In 2021, he was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), highlighting his influence on national technology policy decisions. Dr. Dally continues to drive innovation in circuit-switched GPU datacenters that promise significant boosts to AI computing efficiency, ensuring his ongoing impact on the future trajectory of computational systems. His legacy as a foundational architect of modern parallel computing continues to influence generations of computer scientists and engineers worldwide.
