With AMD and Intel duking it out on the multicore processor front, and server and PC makers pushing ever more scalable systems, Microsoft is looking to stay in lockstep.

Its latest move is hiring Dan Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute, a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the state of North Carolina, as Microsoft Research's director of Scalable and Multicore Computing.

He'll report to Rick Rashid, Microsoft's senior vice president of research, who says that Microsoft needs to make sure its software works on multicore systems used by enteprises and in large service provider data centers.

In addition to his leading research role in North Carolina, Reed is also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and is chairman of the board of the Computing Research Association.

Reed, an expert in parallel computing and large-scale system design, discusses his move at his Renaissance Computing Institute blog and notes that he'll soon be blogging for Microsoft after he starts up at Microsoft Research on December 3. "I will be working with Microsoft researchers and product developers, as well as industry partners and academics. It doesn't get any cooler than this," he writes.