Microsoft's new eXtreme Computing Group (XCG), barely a few months old, is illustrative of the company’s efforts to evolve in order to embrace multicore chips and the Cloud. The Redmond company sees processors with multiple cores and data hosting facilities becoming mainstream examples of 21st century computing, and needed a group that would help transition technology innovations from Microsoft Research into products developed for consumers. In this regard, XCG is designed to tackle challenges brought by ultra-scale and high-performance computing hardware and software development.

Microsoft noted that this group in particular deals with a range of computing efforts, including: “security, cryptography, operating-system design, parallel-programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators, and quantum computing.”

Dan Reed, corporate vice president of XCG, revealed that the focus of XCG was to take hardware and software development to the next level. The group has a unified research and incubation model, which allows it to sit between plain vanilla research and fully fledged product development. Specifically, the group eases the integration of ideas from Microsoft Research into products.

“Our objective is to look at strategic needs and opportunities that cut across product groups and find technology solutions to those problems,” Reed commented. “It's not just 'let's look at this problem and figure out new alternatives. It's 'look at the problem, figure out some new alternatives, build some prototypes of those alternatives, validate them, and then push them into production.'”

One of the key focus areas of the group’s five- to seven-year time horizon operations involves parallel computing. Systems capable of dealing with computations simultaneously rather than sequentially are already becoming the norm. “We have an incredible opportunity, one that comes along once every two or three generations, to reinvent computing,” Reed added. “The opportunity for Microsoft is to leverage those technologies to do that.”

Having moved from academia to Microsoft in 2007, Reed indicates that the Redmond company is offering unique chances for researchers to produce innovations. “This is the only place on the planet where one can tackle these problems at this scale,” he said. “The whole goal for the XCG is to position Microsoft to do things that no one else on the planet can do.”