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Redmond Hires Supercomputer Supergenius

Microsoft has been working quite well with the world's top scientists on solving big problems: disease, hunger, global warming and open source (I made up that last one). A lot of this has to do with harnessing computers to massage massive quantities of data.

I wrote about this in two different articles (here's one and here's the other) and came away impressed.

As cool as all this is, though, I worry that Windows clients are falling behind hardware, with multi-core advances and revolutions in graphics every fortnight. So I wrote a far more distressing article about that.

Maybe Daniel A. Reed can help. Just hired by Microsoft as director of scalable and multi-core computing, Reed has a great track record in academia, and currently serves as director of the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina.

My fear is that Microsoft sees this as a server/cluster/high-performance computing problem. But multi-cores are made for more than climate modeling, 3-D rendering and deciphering the human genome. Our laptops and desktops are going multi-core, as well. This is the area I'd love to see Reed attack.

Posted by Doug Barney on November 12, 2007


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