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March 18, 2008, 03:00 PM ET
Intel, Microsoft Give $20-Million to Universities to Push Computing Limits
Parallel awards to two research universities will help push parallel computing to the next level, executives at the Microsoft Corporation and the Intel Corporation said today. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley will share $20-million in corporate dollars over the next five years for a project that researchers say could produce pocket-sized intelligent devices that recognize people and tell you all about your past interactions with them.
That vision of a personal digital assistant with a visual memory “and that can whisper in your ear” was conjured up by David Patterson, a Berkeley professor of computer science. But it depends on parallel computing, or multiple computer processors working together on a single task divided up into many parts. Mr. Patterson will direct the new Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at Berkeley; the twin center at Illinois will be led by Marc Snir, a professor of computer science there.
The Berkeley group will comprise 14 faculty members and 50 graduate students and post-docs. The center at Illinois will have 20 faculty members and 26 graduate students. Both centers will try to develop software to coordinate these multiple processors, or multiple processing “threads” within a single unit.
That software, executives of the two corporations said, will be available to the companies for non-exclusive license if they want it. Tony Hey, corporate vice president of external research at Microsoft Research, said that would be a rare option. Most of the software rights will remain with the universities, who intend to distribute it with open-source licenses.
The stable source of money is welcome in a strapped financial environment, researchers said. “These days it’s really wonderful to have five years of funding,” Mr. Patterson said. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Research
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