David May (computer scientist)

David May (born 1951) is a British computer scientist whose work spans computer architecture, parallel computing, and robotics. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and founded XMOS Semiconductor, acting as its chief technology officer until February 2014. May led the design of the transputer, the first microprocessor built for parallel and distributed computing. He is among a small group of people to have overseen the creation of a CPU architecture, an interconnect, and a modern programming language.

Early life and education

May was born in Holmfirth, Yorkshire, and attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield. From 1969 to 1972, he studied at King’s College, Cambridge, first mathematics and then computer science at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory (now the Computer Laboratory). There, he learned computer architecture from David Wheeler, who worked on EDSAC and pioneered subroutines, and compiler writing from Martin Richards, who developed BCPL, the language that laid the groundwork for C.

Academic

After moving to the University of Warwick, May began research in robotics. The difficulty of building sensing and control systems led him to create an early concurrent programming language, EPL, which ran on a cluster of single-board microcomputers linked by serial connections. This work connected him with Tony Hoare and Iann Barron, a founder of Inmos.

In 1995, May became Head of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, where he introduced degree programmes with entrepreneurial elements that spawned multiple student start-ups and helped establish the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. He held the post until 2005, when he co-founded XMOS and became its CTO. He remains a professor at Bristol, focusing on computer architecture and programming languages for robotics, the internet of things, and edge computing.

Semiconductor industry and entrepreneurship

Inmos was founded in 1978 with a £50 million UK government investment. May joined to work on microcomputer architecture and became the lead architect of the transputer, which has been used in over a billion units worldwide for applications including massively parallel supercomputing, digital image processing, high-energy physics, robotics, and military systems. Alongside the transputer, May designed the Occam programming language, extending his earlier work and influenced by Tony Hoare’s CSP.