Microsoft, Intel give $20M for multi-core research

Imagine a man you know but whose name you can't remember approaches you, and
your mobile phone uses face-recognition capability to give you his name and
information about him before he says hello. This is the kind of application
that researchers hope will be developed from US$20 million Microsoft
and Intel are giving two
U.S. universities for research on parallel computing.

The companies are donating the money to Universal Parallel Computing Research
Centers (UPCRCs) at the University of California Berkeley and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, they announced at a news conference on Tuesday.
The centers are aimed at tackling the challenges of programming for processors
that have more than one core and so can carry out more than one set of program
instructions at a time, a scenario known as parallel computing.

In addition to the $20 million, the University of Illinois will provide $8
million to fund its center, and UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million in grants
for its research.

UC Berkeley quietly opened its Parallel Computing Lab in January, according
to a UC Berkeley
Web site. The lab was born out of research done there and published in a
white paper by researchers at Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences department in 2006.

In the paper, they said the current evolution of programming models from single-core
to the dual-core and quad-core processors available today from Intel and AMD
won't work for a future where processors could have as many as 16, 32 or hundreds
of processors. They set out to find a better way to develop programming models
to meet the challenges of multi-core chips.

UC Berkeley's David Patterson, a professor of computer science and director
of the UPCRC, described the problem as one of designing programs to take advantage
of parallel computing's ability to divvy up workloads across different processors.
On Tuesday's conference call, he compared the scenario to dividing the work
of writing one story between 16, or even hundreds, of reporters. While the work
could potentially be done 16 -- or even hundreds of times -- faster, "we
won't get to deliver on that performance without balancing the work well,"
he said.

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