Microsoft's new eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) is illustrative of the company’s efforts to evolve in computing in the 21st century, in order to embrace multicore chips and the Cloud. Group's activities span a variety of cutting-edge computing efforts: security, cryptography, operating-system design, parallel-programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators, and quantum computing. “Gustav is an eXtreme Computing Group project aimed at producing painting software that’s easy to use, leverages the multiple cores of future computers, and provides a natural, immersive user experience. And earlier this year, team demonstrated a hardware/software prototype based on Intel's low-power Atom processors, which’re starting to appear in netbooks,” explained Dan Reed.