Supercomputing expert Daniel Reed is to join Microsoft Research as director of Scalable and Multicore Computing, the Redmond giant has revealed.

Reed is an expert in high performance computing, multi-core architectures and scientific applications, as well as a leader in US IT research policy.

He is also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and is the current chairman of the Computing Research Association, which represents the interests of the major academic computing departments and industrial research laboratories in North America.

Reed focuses on the design of very fast computers, providing academics in science, medicine, engineering and the humanities with tools and techniques for capturing and analysing data and real-time performance analysis.

"Multi-core processors represent one of the largest technology transitions in the computing industry today, with deep implications for how we develop software," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of research at Microsoft.

"At the same time, the emergence of software-as-a-service creates new R& D needs for very large-scale data centres for service delivery."

Reed is one of the world's leading experts on parallel computing, and was chief architect of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, a nationwide open-computing infrastructure for science and engineering research.