Industry Giants Try to Break Computing’s Dead End
Intel and Microsoft yesterday announced that they will provide $20 million over five years to two groups of university researchers that will work to design a new generation of computing systems. The goal is to prevent the industry from coming to a dead end that would halt decades of performance increases in computers. The researchers’ efforts could enable the development of new kinds of portable computers that will help computer engineers address a variety of challenges, including speech recognition, image processing, health care systems, and music. The research grant will be used to create independent laboratories at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Each lab will work to reinvent computing by developing hardware, software, and a new generation of applications powered by computer chips containing multiple processors. The research effort is partially motivated by an increasing sense that the industry is in a crisis because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge quickly. The problem is that software needed to keep dozens of processors busy simultaneously does not exist. Although much industry discussion has focused on centralized cloud computing, the new research labs will instead aim to create breakthroughs in mobile computing systems. Professor David Patterson, past president of ACM, will head the new Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at Berkeley, while the Illinois lab will be led by professors Marc Snir and Wenmei Hwu.
New York Times (03/19/08) P. C2; Markoff, John
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