Burton Smith

Burton J. Smith (c. 1945) is an American computer engineer.

Life

Smith earned his bachelor's degree in 1967 in electrical engineering at the University of New Mexico in 1972 and his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He taught from 1970 to 1979 at MIT and the University of Colorado. Then was he who came six years at the Denelcor Inc. in Colorado, where he was the chief architect of the Heterogeneous Element Processor ( HEP ) in 1982 on the market. It uses multithreading (barrels computer) and is considered the first commercially available Multiple Instruction Multiple Data ( MIMD ) computer. 1985-1988 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Defense Analyses, where he was also in the supercomputer research. In 1988 he was a founder of Tera Computer Company ( first Washington DC, then Seattle ), which established the MTA supercomputer (later Cray - MTA), the temporally alternating multithreading of tasks in the many registers of the respective processors used (barrels computer). In 2000 she bought at Cray Research and Tera Computer was renamed Cray Inc.. Smith was a senior scientist and from 1988 to 2005 and from 1988 to 1999 on the board, the CEO of Tera and later Cray.

Since 2005 he is a Technical Fellow of the Microsoft Corporation, the Chief Technical Officer reports directly.

Smith is regarded as one of the leading experts on high performance computer architectures and programming languages ​​for parallel computers. In 1991 he received the Eckert - Mauchly Award. In 2003 he received the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. In 2010 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.