Shortly after having announced to expand the reach of the Windows operating system into the supercomputer arena, Microsoft is adding staff to support its new effort. Burton J. Smith, the former chief scientist and board member of Cray, joins Microsoft to contribute " in the areas of parallel and high-performance computing," the company said today.

Smith co-founded Tera Computer, which merged with Cray back in 2000.

Microsoft released the first public beta version of its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 last month with the goal to take supercomputing "mainstream."

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