OIP 2026 Program

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In a career spanning nearly four decades, Dally has pioneered many of the fundamental technologies underlying today’s supercomputer and networking architectures. As head of NVIDIA Research, he leads a team of more than 300 around the globe who are inventing technologies for a wide variety of applications, including AI, HPC, graphics and networking.

Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2009 as chief scientist and senior vice president of research, he chaired Stanford University’s computer science department for some four years.

Dally is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

He’s written four textbooks, published more than 250 papers and holds over 120 patents, and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award, ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award and ACM Maurice Wilkes Award.

Ram Huggahalli is a Principal Hardware Engineer in Microsoft’s Azure Hardware and Systems Infrastructure organization. As part of the Strategic Planning and Architecture function within this organization, he leads the Optical Technology Pathfinding team that is evaluating emerging optical technologies for AI and Cloud DC applications. Prior to this role, Ram was part of the Microsoft Cobalt processor team contributing to its I/O architecture. Ram also worked for Intel on many projects spanning memory, server networking and large scale HPC fabrics with contributions to Intel Xeon processors and Omni-Path Architecture. Ram holds 20 patents and a Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Management from the University of Missouri.