Berkeley and Illinois

One center will be at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Intel and Microsoft have committed $20 million over the next five years to fund the centers. UIUC will put up another $8 million, and Berkeley has applied for an additional $7 million from the state of California.

Multicore computer processors are common now, and the number of cores is steadily increasing. Intel research director Andrew Chien noted that Intel has already shown an 80-core research processor, and the centers could develop "dramatic new applications." These new apps could involve visual interfaces, statistical analyses, search functions, mobile applications, computer sensing, and new forms of computer-human interfaces.

Richard Shim, an analyst with industry research firm IDC, said parallel computing for even regular consumers and business users "is the future, and it's only a question of how far out."

He added that the challenge is how to use the powerful, multicore systems available on regular computers. "Hardware has definitely gotten ahead of software," he said.

Expertise Tapped

In evaluating where to locate the centers, Microsoft and Intel said they considered 25 top-tier institutions involved in parallel-computing research. They selected UC Berkeley and UIUC because of "their outstanding reputation in computing" and their specific expertise in parallel computing.

Berkeley's center will be directed by David Patterson, a professor of computer science described by the companies as a pioneering expert in computer architecture. Fourteen members of the UC Berkeley faculty will also be involved as well 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.

The UIUC center will be headed by Marc Snir, a professor of computer science and the Wen-Mei Hwu professor of electrical and computer engineering. He will be assisted by 20 other faculty members and 26 graduate students and researchers.

Snir said the centers "face the exciting challenge of making parallelism so easy to use that parallel programming becomes synonymous with programming."

Microsoft and Intel also described the challenge as bringing the benefits of tens or hundreds of cores to mainstream developers by making it easier to create solutions using parallel computing, through new platform and OS architectures, programming methods and tools, and application models.