He transferred out of Pomona to the University of New Mexico following his freshman year, but was still unhappy with his education and subsequently dropped out of college entirely to join the Navy.

Smith spent four years with the military before returning to the University of New Mexico, changing his studies from physics to Electrical engineering, graduating summa cum laude with a B.S.E.E.

Smith turned down acceptances from Berkeley and Stanford to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue his Doctorate, citing a financial aid package as the reasoning behind his decision.

In December, 2005, Smith was hired by Microsoft as a Technical Fellow, working with various groups within the company to define and expand efforts in the areas of parallel and high-performance computing.

He received the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award and was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

[2] In 2018 he received the George Cotter Award for vision and leadership in the field of data analytics from the Association for High Speed Computing.