Intel, Microsoft Collaborate with Universities on Parallel Computing Initiative

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Intel, Microsoft Collaborate with Universities on Parallel Computing Initiative

3/18/2008

By David Nagel

For Microsoft and Intel, the computing universe is going parallel. Representatives from the companies met with reporters Tuesday morning to talk about a new parallel computing initiative involving the launch of two multi-million-dollar Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers--one at University of California, Berkeley and one at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which were selected from 25 universities evaluated for the initiative. The companies have committed $20 million over the next five years to fund the centers, which will focus on applications, architecture, and operating systems.

In addition to funding from Microsoft and Intel, IUUC will contribute $8 million toward the research center on its campus, and UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million from a state-supported program to match industry grants.

At UC Berkeley, the UPCRC, headed up by David Patterson, professor of computer science, will be staffed by 14 faculty members and will include 50 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. At UIUC, the UPCRC will be headed up by Marc Snir, professor of computer science, and Wen-Mei Hwu, professor of electrical and computer engineering. Its team will include 20 faculty members and 26 graduate students and researchers.

"This is the first joint industry-university research collaboration in parallel computing of this magnitude," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of External Research at Microsoft Research, "and it's really focused on achieving the long-term [advances] that are needed to make parallel computing accessible to mainstream developers."

Foundations for Future Computing
This goal of making parallel programming more accessible to the wider programming population, according to those involved with the initiative, is going to be critical in a world in which advances in computing performance will be coming by way of increases in the number of processing cores built into generic CPUs, which could conceivably double every couple of years--with no upper limit.

"We want to democratize parallelism," said UIUC's Snir in a telephone conference. "We want each programmer to be a parallel programmer. We want parallel programming to be synonymous with programming really. And, in fact, parallel programming can be simple. We do believe that with the right technology, we can make most parallel programming easy. We believe we have a very promising roadmap for these technologies and how to make the parallel programmers' lives simple."

The move represents not just another parallel computing initiative, according Berkeley's Patterson; it's setting the foundation for the future of computing in which the drive for higher-performing systems turns to energy-efficient, expanded multi-core architectures and away from the seeming dead end of single-core clock speed increases.