Sally McKee

American computer scientist who co-authored, with William Wulf, "Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious" (dated December 1994; published ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News 23(1), March 1995), both signing from the University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science at the time. Matters to this vault jointly with Wulf as co-namer of the memory wall, the foundational concept the vault's memory-bandwidth-bottleneck cluster (claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee, claim-roofline-model-compute-bound-vs-memory-bound, claim-llm-inference-prefill-decode) traces back to.

The frequently-repeated detail that McKee was Wulf's graduate student at the time is sourced only to a Tier-3 UVA press retrospective, not confirmed by the primary paper itself (both authors sign only as UVA CS, no student/faculty distinction stated) — see claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee's frontmatter for the discharged verification.

References

• claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee
• claim-compute-outpaces-memory-bandwidth-ai-hardware-scaling
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-memory-wall-pim-genomics, 2026-08-12-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different (entity-candidate mention only)