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 11/12/2007 at 1:15 PM