Designer of Supercomputers Leaves Cray to Join Microsoft
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 26, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 25 - Burton Smith, a longtime supercomputer designer and chief scientist at Cray, has resigned to take a position at Microsoft.
Mr. Smith was a founder of Tera Computer, which in 2000 acquired Cray Research from Silicon Graphics. The company, which was based in Seattle, was renamed Cray.
A Microsoft spokesman said Friday that Mr. Smith would work for Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft's chief technology officers and formerly chief executive of Alliant Computer Systems, a maker of an early minisupercomputer.
Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it planned to introduce a new version of its Windows software for scientific and engineering users, and that Mr. Smith would be involved.
"He's a really smart guy and an innovator," said Steven Wallach, a founder of the Convex Computer Corporation, and currently a venture investor. "The designs he developed were milestones in computer architecture."
While at Tera and previously at a Denver start-up supercomputer maker, Denelcor, Mr. Smith was a pioneer of an innovative computer design called multithreaded architecture, or MTA, which allows several programs to run simultaneously in computer hardware.
The approach was an alternative to Seymour Cray's "vector" style of computing, which was optimized for quickly performing calculations on long arrays of numbers.
Although the MTA idea was adopted in Intel's microprocessors, Mr. Smith's supercomputer designs were not commercially successful and are no longer offered as products by the supercomputer maker. The company does continue to support the design for a government intelligence agency.
Cray, which lost $204 million last year, has continued to offer the vector style of computer as well as a second series of machines based on the Opteron microprocessor of Advanced Micro Design.
Cray has stated that its design direction is toward a heterogeneous approach, which will combine features of vector processing and microprocessor-based massively parallel supercomputing designs.
In addition to being Cray's chief scientist, Mr. Smith has been head of the company's Cascade supercomputing initiative, which is one of three competitions supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of an effort to design computers able to process at a petaflop, or a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.
At this year's supercomputing show Microsoft's entry was greeted by some skepticism. The company is trying to persuade technical computing users to adopt its software, but that community still relies heavily on Unix and related types of software.
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