The Seattle Washington-based company said that Burton Smith, who co-founded the company’s previous incarnation of Tera Computer Co, will leave Cray on December 7, resigning both his position as chief scientist and his place on the board of directors.
In a statement Smith said he was leaving Cray to take up a new and very different opportunity at Microsoft, although it would not be a huge surprise to see him involved with the Cluster Server 2003 variant of Windows that was officially launched at the SuperComputing 2005 tradeshow in Seattle.
Smith co-founded Tera Computer in 1987 with James Rottsolk, and the company acquired the Cray Research subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc in April 2000 before changing its name to that of the company established in 1972 by supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray.
