Bill Dally Receives Eckert-Mauchly Award

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Bill Dally, Chief Scientist at GPU juggernaut NVIDIA, was awarded top honors by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery [ACM] for his work in computer architecture.  Dally was honored by the two organizations with the Eckert-Mauchly Award for his work in parallel computing architectures.

This wonderful recognition reflects how Bill’s pioneering work in parallel processing is on its way to revolutionizing computing,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA CEO and president. “We are delighted to have the benefits of his singular talent as we endeavor through our GPUs to bring parallel computing to the world.”

Previous award winners include the likes of Seymour Cray, David Patterson and John Hennessy.  It goes without saying that Dally sits high on a very short list.

In recognizing Dally for his achievements, the ACM and IEEE wrote: “Early in his career, Dally recognized the limitations of serial or sequential processing to cope with the increasing need for processing power in order to solve complex computational problems. He perceived the ability of parallel processing, in which many processing cores, each optimized for efficiency, can work together to solve a problem.”

The organizations note: “Dally developed the system and network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today. He also introduced the Imagine processor, which employs stream processing architecture, providing high-performance computing with power, speed, and efficiency.”

Dally will receive the award at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture which will take place June 19-23, in Saint-Malo, France.  With over 200 papers and over 75 patents, Dally has put in more than his fare share of research effort in our little niche of technology.

Having shared a table with Dally at a recent high performance computing architecture consortium, he’s an incredibly charismatic and interesting individual.  For the young guns of HPC in the audience, take notice.