Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), a fabless semiconductor company focused on making parallel processing simple, today announced that company co-founder, chairman and chief scientist William Dally has been named a finalist for “Innovator of the Year” in EDN’s 18th Annual Innovation Awards. The magazine annually recognizes outstanding achievements in state-of-the-art semiconductor design and Dally was nominated for developing a practical, massively parallel processing technique. The magazine’s readers will help select the winner.
Dally, chairman of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, led ground-breaking efforts over the last 10 years to develop system and network technology used in most large parallel computers today. He is widely considered the inventor and father of stream processing, an architecture that addresses key usability challenges to unlock the performance of parallelism. Devices based on his research at MIT and Stanford are now in production at AMD, IBM, nVidia and Stream Processors, Inc.
Dally presided over last year’s début of the world’s highest-performing DSP – the Storm-1 SP16HP. The processor that Dally and his team developed is a C-programmable DSP that currently offers up to 448 GMACS of compute performance at a record low 0.05 mW per MMAC and can scale to even higher levels of performance. The Storm-1 SP16HP is also a finalist for an EDN Innovations award.
“It’s an honor just to be considered as an EDN Innovation Award finalist in what surely is a field of highly accomplished nominees,” Dally said. “The team at SPI has made tremendous contributions to the Storm-1 family of stream processors and we feel we are just beginning a long and significant cycle of innovation.”
Now in its 18th year, EDN’s Innovation Awards program recognizes and honors outstanding engineering professionals and products. The program nurtures the award-winning designers of the future by donating a portion of the proceeds from the nominations and the awards event to an engineering college or university chosen by the Innovator of the Year.
“Bill Dally not only took on the challenges of parallel processing with an innovative architecture – he made it easy to program,” said Chip Stearns, President and CEO of SPI. “This is the type of innovation that really propels our industry forward.”
During the month of February, EDN’s worldwide audience of electronics engineers and engineering managers will use an online ballot to select the ultimate winners from among the finalists. EDN’s editorial staff and Editorial Advisory Board also take part in determining the final winners. Visit www.EDN.com/innovation18 to review each of the nominees. Winners will be announced April 14.
About EDN and EDN.com
EDN serves the vital information needs of design engineers and engineering managers worldwide. EDN.com delivers a three-dimensional view of the electronics industry via news coverage, strategic business information, and in-depth technical content. (www.edn.com) EDN is published by Reed Business Information (www.reedbusiness.com/us), the largest business-to-business publisher in the U.S. and a member of the Reed Elsevier Group plc (NYSE: RUK and ENL) – a world-leading publisher and information provider.
About Stream Processors, Inc.
Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI) is a privately held fabless semiconductor company developing an innovative stream processing architecture that will help consumer and industrial companies accelerate time to market for their products, while greatly reducing system development costs. SPI was founded in 2004 in the recognition that the new era of compute-intensive applications requires radically increased levels of processor performance and efficiency. The company’s technology and products improve application productivity by making parallel processing easier to program and use