Chuck Thacker, a pioneer in computer science and a technical fellow with Microsoft Research, has been named winner of the 2009 A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious honor in computing.

Forty-two years later, Thacker, a technical fellow with Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, has ascended to the peak of his accidental profession, being honored March 9 as the 2009 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s highest accolade, the A.M. Turing Award, given for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.

The award, which is accompanied by a prize of $250,000, generally goes to computer scientists noted for conceptual or theoretical work. Thacker, 67, becomes just the second person to receive a Turing Award, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing, for contributions in designing and building computer machinery, following Britain’s Maurice Wilkes, the 1967 recipient.

hacker is in his 13th year at Microsoft, but don’t expect his 13-year itch to strike again. He remains engaged and active in his work, leading a computer-architecture group in Silicon Valley and working with academia to use field-programmable gate arrays to enable multicore-computing experimentation. He’s also quite intrigued by a project called Barrelfish, a partnership between Microsoft Research Cambridge and ETH Zurich that will enable research on operating-system principles specifically for multicore systems.