Bill Dally

Who is Bill Dally?

William James "Bill" Dally is the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering and past Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Stanford. Previously he taught at MIT where he and his group built the J–Machine and the M–Machine, parallel machines emphasizing low overhead synchronization and communication. Prior to that, at Bell Telephone Laboratories he contributed to the design of the BELLMAC32, an early 32-bit microprocessor, and designed the MARS hardware accelerator.

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

Dally was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2002, and a Fellow of the IEEE, also in 2002. He received the ACM/SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award in 2000 and the Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award in 2004. In 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2009 the National Academy of Engineering. He received the 2010 ACM/IEEE Eckert–Mauchly Award for "outstanding contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks and parallel computers."