Nvidia chief scientist has been honoured with the Eckert-Mauchly Award, considered the most prestigious prize for computer architecture. In awarding the prize, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE) called Dally a 'visionary' for advancing the state of computing using parallel processors.
'This wonderful recognition reflects how Bill's pioneering work in parallel processing is on its way to revolutionising 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 winners of the Eckert-Mauchly Award include Seymour Cray, a key figure in the birth of supercomputing; David Patterson, a computer pioneer teaching at University of California, Berkeley; and Stanford president John Hennessy.
In recognising Dally for his achievements, the ACM and IEEE wrote: 'Early in his career, Dally recognised 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 optimised for efficiency, can work together to solve a problem.'
Parallel processing has expanded in recent years from its traditional realm of environmental science, biotechnology and genetics to applications in such areas as data mining, oil exploration, web search engines, medical imaging and diagnosis, pharmaceutical design, and financial and economic modeling.
The organisations note: 'Dally developed the system and network architecture, signalling, routing, and synchronisation 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.'
