REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 9, 2007 — Daniel A. Reed will join Microsoft Research as director of Scalable and Multicore Computing, reporting to Senior Vice President of Research Rick Rashid. Reed is an expert in high-performance computing, multicore architectures and scientific applications, as well as a leader in U.S. information technology research policy.

Reed is the director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the state of North Carolina. He is also a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and is the current chair of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, which represents the interests of the major academic computing departments and industrial research laboratories in North America.

“Multicore processors represent one of the largest technology transitions in the computing industry today, with deep implications for how we develop software. At the same time, the emergence of software as a service creates new R&D needs for very large-scale datacenters for service delivery,” Rashid said. “Dan brings to Microsoft Research the kind of vision and expertise that will help us unleash the potential of software for these new computing paradigms.”

Reed is one of the world’s leading experts on parallel computing, large-scale system design and related domains. As a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee he chaired the subcommittee on computational science, which produced the report “Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness.” He also co-chaired the 2007 review of IT research by PCAST, which produced the report “Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World.” While director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2000 to 2004, Reed was chief architect of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a nationwide open-computing infrastructure for science and engineering research.

“Two great forces are reshaping computing: multicore processors with unprecedented power and the explosive growth of software services hosted on megascale data centers,” said Reed. “There’s no better place than Microsoft Research for me to explore next-generation hardware and software designs that address these fundamental technology challenges.”

About Microsoft Research

Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft Research employs more than 700 people in five labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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