Take that Moore’s Law! Nvidia’s chief scientist Bill Dally, a recent vocal critic of shrinking microprocessors on the Intel co-founder’s famous schedule, was honored Wednesday with perhaps the high-tech industry’s most prestigious award for advancing computing architecture.
Dally, who joined Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia as the graphics chip maker’s chief scientist in 2009, was awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE) with the Eckert-Mauchly Award.
The two computing organizations described Dalley as a “visionary” for his work in advancing parallel processing in computing. Prior to joining Nvida, he headed Stanford University’s Computer Science department, led the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team that built pioneering parallel computing systems called the J-Machine and M-Machine, and designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine at the California Institute of Technology.
Dally also stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest recently when he declared in a guest column for Forbes that “the CPU scaling predicted by Moore's Law is now dead.”
In the Forbes column, he argued that performance gains from both parallel computing advances and from adding cores to microprocessors have largely superseded the paradigm of ever-increasing computer performance linked to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months or so.
That view drew support from some but also criticism from skeptics who suggested his column was an attack on Nvidia rival Intel.
The ACM and IEEE, however, appeared to have little doubt about Dally’s lifetime contributions to computing. Dally, who owns more than 75 patents and has published more than 200 papers, joins such past winners of the Eckert-Mauchly Award as supercomputing legend Seymour Cray and David Patterson, who pioneered instruction in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
His current boss was also impressed with Dally.
“This wonderful recognition reflects how Bill's pioneering work in parallel processing is on its way to revolutionizing computing,” said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, in a statement. “We are delighted to have the benefits of his singular talent as we endeavor through our GPUs to bring parallel computing to the world.”
