Burton J. Smith, technical fellow for Microsoft Corp., works with various groups within the company to help expand efforts in the areas of parallel and high-performance computing. He reports directly to Craig Mundie, chief technical officer and senior vice president for Advanced Strategies and Policy.
Burton is recognized as an international leader in high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computers. Before joining Microsoft, Smith served at Cray Inc., formerly Tera Computer Company, as chief scientist and a member of the board of directors from its inception in 1988 to 2005, and as its chairman from 1988 to 1999. Prior to founding Tera Computer Company in 1988 Smith spent six years with Denelcor, Inc. and three years with the Institute for Defense Analyses. From 1970-1979 he taught at the University of Colorado, Denver and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Smith has published a variety of documents on parallel computing issues.
In 2003, Smith was honored with the Seymour Cray Computing Engineering Award from the IEEE Computer Society and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Smith received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1991 given jointly by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery and was elected a fellow of each organization in 1994. Smith is currently on the review committee for the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computer and Computational Sciences Division, and he is on the advisory committee for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Computational Science and Engineering Division.
Smith attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology where earned his S.M., E.E. and Sc.D. degrees.
