Professor Sally A. McKee, who coined the influential term "the memory wall" in a landmark 1994 paper, died Feb. 12 in Greenville, South Carolina, at age 61 after a short illness. McKee's doctoral work at the University of Virginia identified a fundamental bottleneck in computer architecture that would shape decades of research into memory systems.

Her paper "Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious" arrived when most computer science researchers focused on cache optimization. McKee recognized that the growing speed gap between processors and memory would become a critical limitation—and the term she introduced entered the field's permanent vocabulary. The work earned her recognition as a pioneering thinker in computer architecture.

McKee held positions at Cornell University, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and most recently Clemson University, where she served as the C. Tycho Howle Chair in Collaborative Computing Environments until 2021. She worked previously at Digital Equipment Corporation and Microsoft. Beyond her research, McKee was celebrated for mentoring graduate students and supporting rising female computer scientists.

Colleagues remembered her as brilliant and generous, with a mischievous sense of humor and a deep love of chocolate. She is survived by her wife, Gina DiBartolo, and a wide circle of friends and former students.