Rate My Professor William Dally

William Dally is an Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, holding the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professorship of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and serving as former Chairman of the Computer Science Department from 2005 to 2009. Currently, he is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation, a role he assumed in January 2009 after consulting for the company. Dally earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1981, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology in 1986. Earlier in his career, he worked at Bell Laboratories on the Bellmac 32 microprocessor and contributed to Stac Electronics.

His research specializes in computer architecture, parallel computing, interconnection networks, and VLSI systems. At Caltech from 1983 to 1986, Dally designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and Torus Routing chip, pioneering wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control techniques still used in modern systems. As Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT from 1986 to 1997, he led development of the J-Machine and M-Machine experimental parallel computers, introducing separation of mechanism from programming models and low-overhead synchronization and communication. At Stanford since 1997, directing the Concurrent VLSI Architecture Group within the Computer Systems Laboratory, he advanced system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization for large parallel computers, including collaborations with Cray Research on the T3D and T3E supercomputers since 1989. He co-founded Velio Communications (1999-2003) and Stream Processors, Inc. Dally has published over 250 papers, holds more than 120 patents, and authored four textbooks, including "Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks" (2004, with Brian Towles), "Digital Systems Engineering" (1998, with John W. Poulton), "Virtual-Channel Flow Control" (IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1992), and "The M-Machine Multicomputer" (1997). His contributions earned the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award (2000), IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award (2004), ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award (2010), election to the National Academy of Engineering (2009), fellowships in the IEEE, ACM, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2025), and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025).