Today Microsoft and Intel announced a joint endeavor with UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign around parallel computing. I’ve been heavily involved in this, coordinating Microsoft‘s engagement on the technical side of things. Remember that photo with all the senior Microsoft and Intel technical folks back in the summer?
After a year of work and preparations, I am thrilled that this was finally announced. I am not going to go through the details since there is going to be plenty of coverage from the PR folks of all those involved. Let’s hope that this is going to be the start of a new era in parallel computing.
Oh… and please don’t ask me about the choice of name for the centers 🙂 It was my first exposure to the process of how big companies decide on names 🙂
One response to “"Universal Parallel Computing Research Center" x 2”
Savas –
We are excited to see Microsoft and Intel continuing to make major investments in this critical area. I think you should also note that this area is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity right now.
While Microsoft, Intel, UC Berkeley, and other giant organizations have a key role to play in addressing the need for better multi-core tools and techniques, many smaller companies have already jumped in with useful (if partial) solutions for a broad class of programming problems. At Digipede, we’ve developed a simple approach for distributing objects across many cores on a chip, many chips in a computer, and many computers in a grid. We recently put up a short (4 minute) video demonstrating this (to see it, start on my blog and follow the link to the video – http://powersunfiltered.com/2008/02/19/multi-core-and-grid-computing-new-digipede-video-shows-the-way/).
This approach won’t work for every problem, but for a broad variety of applications it enables developers to write single threaded code which will then be executed on all available cores, CPUs, and/or grid nodes. Naturally, we’re not alone – there are products from Rogue Wave, eXludus, Interactive Supercomputing, and other innovative software vendors that tackle similar problems (in very different ways).
So while more general solutions may come from some of the advanced research being funded by Microsoft, Intel and others, for those who need solutions today, it’s a good idea to investigate what’s already available.
– John Powers, President, Digipede Technologies