Bell Labs Dally has received a
bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering from
Virginia Tech. While working for
Bell Telephone Laboratories he contributed to the design of the
Bellmac 32, an early 32-bit microprocessor, and earned an
master's degree in electrical engineering from
Stanford University in 1981. He then went to the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1983 to 1986,
MIT From 1986 to 1997 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. During his MIT times he claims to have collaborated on developing design of
Cray T3D and
Cray T3E supercomputers.
Stanford He joined the Stanford faculty in 1997, where he became the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the
Stanford University School of Engineering and chaired the computer science department from 2005-2009. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Stanford.
Corporate Involvements Dally's corporate involvements include various collaborations at
Cray Research since 1989. He did Internet router work at Avici Systems starting in 1997, was chief technical officer at Velio Communications from 1999 until its 2003 acquisition by
LSI Logic, founder and chairman of
Stream Processors, Inc until it folded. He received the ACM/SIGARCH
Maurice Wilkes Award in 2000, the
Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award in 2004, and the
IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award in 2006. In 2007 he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2009 he was appointed chief scientist of
Nvidia. He worked full-time at Nvidia, while supervising about 12 of his graduate students at Stanford. He is currently chief scientist and
SVP of Nvidia Research. Among many contributions to technology at Nvidia, Dally also kick-started optical interconnects for GPU and computing systems using micro ring modulators utilizing multiple wavelengths. These systems can lead to the adoption of very high bandwidth, low energy per bit optical interconnects in GPUs and also lead to circuit switched GPU datacenters with significant boost to AI computing efficiency. In 2009, he was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the design of high-performance interconnect networks and parallel computer architectures. He received the 2010 ACM/IEEE
Eckert–Mauchly Award for "outstanding contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks and parallel computers." In 2025 he was awarded the
Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with
Yoshua Bengio,
Geoffrey E. Hinton,
John Hopfield,
Yann LeCun,
Jen-Hsun Huang and
Fei-Fei Li. == Personal life ==