Supercomputing expert Dan Reed, who saw the birth of the Web browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is joining Microsoft Research as director of scalable and multicore computing. This serious college-basketball fan is tearing himself away from the hoops heartland surrounding North Carolina's Research Triangle to lead Microsoft's efforts in multicore technology and next-generation data centers. "I watched Mosaic come up out of the ground and I watched my students go off to start-ups, and I promised myself that if the surf was up again that I was going to grab my board and get in the water," Reed told Network World Senior Editor John Fontana, during a chat about Reed's move from academia and what he says could be a coming revolution that rivals the development of the Web.