NVIDIA Picks Bill Dally As Chief Scientist

As NVIDIA branches out from being just another GPU maker and looks to fight with the likes of Intel in the burgeoning netbook component sector, it's going to need a few good men and women to make it happen. That being the case, we're not at all surprised to see the company going out and selecting Bill Dally to be its new Chief Scientist and Vice President of NVIDIA Research.

NVIDIA is plucking Mr. Dally (pictured) from Stanford University's computer science department, where he previously stood as a Professor of Computer Science since 1997 and the Chairman of the Computer Science Department since 2005. According to a brief biography, he and his team were responsible for "developing the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today." While at Caltech, he engineered the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip which pioneered "wormhole" routing and virtual-channel flow control. During his stint at MIT, his crew built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanism from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. If you needed any other attributes to really make you a believer, he has also published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents and has probably never taken a week of vacation in his adult life.

As for the man that Bill Dally is replacing? That would be Mr. David Kirk, who has vacated his spot and taken on the appointment of "NVIDIA Fellow." Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO, NVIDIA, had this to say about the addition of Dally to his staff: "I am thrilled to welcome Bill to NVIDIA at such a pivotal time for our company. His pioneering work in stream processors at Stanford greatly influenced the work we are doing at NVIDIA today. As one of the world’s founding visionaries in parallel computing, he shares our passion for the GPU’s evolution into a general purpose parallel processor and how it is increasingly becoming the soul of the new PC. His reputation as an innovator in our industry is unrivaled. It is truly an honor to have a legend like Bill in our company."

We don't need to tell Bill that he has some pretty big shoes to fill, and we're sure the challenges ahead will be significant. Of course, with a background such as his, we figure NVIDIA's not worried a bit about his ability to contribute.
Tags:  Nvidia, graphics, GPU