NVIDIA appoints Bill Dally as Chief Scientist, VP of Research

NVIDIA today announced that Bill Dally, the chairman of Stanford University's computer science department, will join the company as Chief Scientist and Vice President of NVIDIA Research. The company also announced that longtime Chief Scientist David Kirk has been appointed "NVIDIA Fellow."

"I am thrilled to welcome Bill to NVIDIA at such a pivotal time for our company," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO, NVIDIA. "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."

"I would also like to congratulate David Kirk for the enormous impact he has had at NVIDIA. David has worn many hats over the years -- from product architecture to chief evangelist. His technical and strategic insight has helped us enable an entire new world of visual computing. We will all continue to benefit from his valuable contributions."

About Bill Dally
At Stanford University, Dally has been a Professor of Computer Science since 1997 and Chairman of the Computer Science Department since 2005. Dally and his team developed the system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing and synchronization technology that is found in most large parallel computers today. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip which pioneered "wormhole" routing and virtual- channel flow control. His group at MIT 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. He is a cofounder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors, Inc. Dally is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks, Digital Systems Engineering and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.

About David Kirk
David Kirk has been with NVIDIA since January 1997. His contribution includes leading NVIDIA(R) graphics technology development for today's most popular consumer entertainment platforms. In 2006, Dr. Kirk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his role in bringing high- performance graphics to personal computers. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions awarded in engineering. In 2002, Dr. Kirk received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market. From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Kirk was Chief Scientist, Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game manufacturing company. From 1989 to 1991, Dr. Kirk was an engineer for the Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard Company. Dr. Kirk is the inventor of 50 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and has published more than 50 articles on graphics technology. Dr. Kirk holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology.