Dr. Burton J. Smith

A computer architect, he is currently a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. He earned a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of New Mexico in 1967. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning an Sc.D. in 1972. From 1970 to 1979, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado. He then spent six years at Denelcor Inc. in Colorado, serving as Vice President of Research and Development. He was the primary architect of the Denelcor Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP). From 1985 to 1988, he was a fellow of the Institute for Defense Analyses Supercomputing Research Center. He co-founded Tera Computer Company and from 1988 until 2005 he served as its chief scientist and a member of the board of directors. He was also the company's Chairman from 1988 until 1999. In December, 2005, he was hired by Microsoft as a Technical Fellow, working with various groups within the company to define and expand efforts in the areas of parallel and high-performance computing. He received the 1991 Eckert-Mauchly Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2003, he received the Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award from the IEEE Computer Society and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.