William James Dally (born August 17, 1960) is an American computer scientist and educator. He is the chief scientist and senior vice president at

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

and was previously a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

. 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 In concurrent computing, deadlock is any situation in which no member of some group of entities can proceed because each waits for another member, including itself, to take action, such as sending a message or, more commonly, releasing a lock. ...

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''. Switchin ...

, link-level retry,

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered as digits on a receiver's ...

s, 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 John Poulton is an electrical engineer at Nvidia Corporation in Durham, North Carolina. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012 for his contributions to high-speed, low power signaling and graphi ...

, and ''Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks'' with Brian Towles. He was inventor or co-inventor on over 70 granted patents.

Career

Bell Labs

Dally has received a

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Virginia Tech The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly referred to as Virginia Tech (VT), is a Public university, public Land-grant college, land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States ...

. While working for

Bell Telephone Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

he contributed to the design of the

Bellmac 32 The Bellmac 32, also known as the WE 32000, 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 c ...

, an early 32-bit microprocessor, and earned an

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

in electrical engineering from

in 1981. He then went to the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

(Caltech) from 1983 to 1986, graduating with a

Ph.D. degree A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

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

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 Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its Lempel–Ziv–Stac lossless compression algorithm and Stacker dis ...

in 1983.

MIT

From 1986 to 1997 he taught at

where he and his group built the

J–Machine The J–Machine (Jellybean-Machine) was a parallel computer designed by the MIT Concurrent VLSI Architecture group in conjunction with the Intel Corporation. The machine used "jellybean" parts—cheap and multitudinous commodity parts, each with a ...

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 fu ...

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. Organizati ...

and chairman of the computer science department at Stanford. He served as chairman for twelve years before moving on to Nvidia. Dally's corporate involvements include various collaborations at

Cray Research Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

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 was an American company founded in Santa Clara, 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 ...

, 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 membe ...

in 2002, and a Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

, 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 2006. In 2007 he was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) 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 other ...

. In January 2009 he was appointed chief scientist of

. He worked full-time at Nvidia, while supervising about 12 of his graduate students at Stanford. He is currently chief scientist and SVP of Nvidia Research. Among many contributions to technology at Nvidia, Dally also kick-started optical interconnects for GPU and computing systems using micro ring modulators utilizing multiple wavelengths. These systems can lead to the adoption of very high bandwidth, low energy per bit optical interconnects in GPUs and also lead to circuit switched GPU datacenters with significant boost to AI computing efficiency. In 2009, he was elected to the

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

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 Joh ...

for "outstanding contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks and parallel computers." In 2025 he was awarded the

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Queen most commonly refers to: * Queen regnant, a female monarch of a kingdom * Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king * Queen (band), a British rock band Queen or QUEEN may also refer to: Monarchy * Queen dowager, the widow of a king * ...

jointly with

Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute Montreal In ...

, Geoffrey E. Hinton,

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of Princeton University, most widely known for his study of associative neural networks in 1982. He is known for the development of the Hopfield network. ...

Yann LeCun Yann André Le Cun ( , ; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Pr ...

Jen-Hsun Huang Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang ( zh, t=黃仁勳, poj=N̂g Jîn-hun, hp=Huáng Rénxūn; born February 17, 1963) is a Taiwanese and American businessman, electrical engineer, and philanthropist who is the president, co-founder, and chief executive of ...

and

Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li (; born in Beijing, China, July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in computer vision. She is best known for establishing ImageNet, the dat ...

.Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering 2025
/ref>

Personal life

Dally is married and has three children. He had a flight mishap in 1992 when the

Cessna 210 The Cessna 210 Centurion is a six-seat, high-performance, retractable-gear, single-engined, high-wing general-aviation light aircraft. First flown in January 1957, it was produced by Cessna until 1986. Development The early Cessna 210 (21 ...

he was flying from Hanscom Field, Massachusetts to

Farmingdale, New York Farmingdale is an incorporated village on Long Island within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York, United States. The population was 8,466 at the time of the 2020 Census. The Lenox Hills neighborhood is adjacent to Bethpage State ...

in bad weather conditions experienced an oil leak. He was forced to make a crash landing in the

Long Island Sound Long Island Sound is a sound (geography), marine sound and tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It lies predominantly between the U.S. state of Connecticut to the north and Long Island in New York (state), New York to the south. From west to east, ...

and was retrieved by a rescue sailboat.

Works

* * *

References

External links

Stanford Faculty Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dally, Bill American computer scientists American technology writers Computer systems researchers 2002 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows 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 Maurice Wilkes Award winners