Stanford Prof. is Nvidia's New Chief Scientist

Nvidia had a couple of announcements about changes to to the company’s executives on Wednesday. The company announced that Bill Dally, the chairman of Stanford University’s computer science department, would be joining the company as chief scientist and vice president of Nvidia Research.

The move comes just a couple of days after Nvidia president Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told reporters that the company will spend more money on research this year than it did last year.

According to Nvidia, 48 year old Dally has been professor of computer science at Stanford since 1997 as well as chairman of the computer science department since 2005. Dally and his team are credited with developing the guts of the technology found in most large parallel computers today. He has also worked at Caltech and MIT and is a co-founder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors. Dally has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is author of the textbooks, "Digital Systems Engineering" and "Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks."
 
“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.”

Dally is to replace former chief scientist, David Kirk who has in turn been appointed Nvidia Fellow. Kirk has been with Nvidia since 1997 and as Huang said, “has worn many hats over the years.” From 1989 to 1991, Kirk was an engineer for the Apollo Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard Company and from ‘93 to ‘96, he was chief scientist, Head of Technology for Crystal Dynamics. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Caltech.