Microsoft and Intel are the biggest companies from the software and, respectively, from the hardware market, but that didn`t stop them to come together with a $20 million grant for two universities. With these funds, Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers from UC -Berkeley and The University of Illinois at Champaign, Urbana will have to research and develop a way to make “parallelism so easy to use that parallel programming becomes synonymous with programming”, according to the head of the UIUC lab, Mark Snir.

He was referring to the fact that in recent years, companies stopped developing faster-processing chips, and concentrated their efforts on making multiple chips work together on the same silicon chip instead. This way, more computer functions can be processed in parallel, and not one at a time. The problem with these new systems is that programmers today are still writing programs that solve problems in a serial fashion.

The most advanced microprocessors have up to eight cores on a chip, but the industry is moving toward chips with 100 or more. Again, researchers state that the issue is not regarding the hardware component, but that a software to keep 10 or more processors busy simply does not exist.

If the research efforts of these universities will be successful, the processing power resulted will lead to developing new sorts of portable PCs and would be decisive in improving areas like image processing, speech recognition, health care systems and music. For example, the digital musical instruments could be as versatile and complex as pianos or violins.

Via