Intel and Microsoft to fund parallel computing research centers
Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have teamed up with two universities to build research centers that will focus on advanced research on parallel computing which will enable developers to make full utilization of resources offered by the latest multi-core processors.
Both the companies evaluated 25 institutions before selecting University of California, Berkeley and University of Illinois to build research centers which are estimated to cost around $20 million.
Parallel computing is basically splitting one big task into smaller parts which can be processed on different processors present in the system to handle the task more efficiently.
As companies like Intel, IBM and AMD are introducing more and more multi-core processors in the market and hardware market is already seen moving from single-core processor to multi-core processors, it became a priority from software point of view to optimize the software technology to make full utilization of the resources offered by these new processors, without software optimization there will be very less or almost no benefit of multi-core processors.
Data and software developed by the researchers will be made available to the technology community which will enable software developers to make software for the next generation hardware which will unlock the power of parallel computing.