As they had announced on Monday, Intel and Microsoft made public on Tuesday the decision to sponsor the Parallel Computing Lab opened in January 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley, but also research facilities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So, the world’s largest and most popular companies on their markets, that is the chip market and the software market respectively, Intel and Microsoft announced that they would once again join forces and spend no less than $20 million over the following five years on academic research related to parallel computing, which is a concept that can be simply explained as the process of programming for microprocessors that have more than one core, so that can carry out more than one set of program instructions at a time.

About two years ago, researchers at Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department warned that dual-core or quad-core chips would not work for a future where processors could have as many as 16 or 32, or even more, cores. Thus, they announced that they would try to find a better way to develop programming models in order to meet the challenges of multi-core microprocessors.

In this context, it is obvious why Berkeley researchers’ efforts are important both for Microsoft and Intel. The latter, for example, is to release Dunnington, a six-core processor, in the second half of 2008 and Nehalem, an eight-core processor, in late 2008.

The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hope to spend also about $15 million from their own budgets on this project.

"Twenty-plus years ago, the research space in parallel computing was looking toward the end of Moore's Law, and so there were bases that were built there to exploit parallelization," said Microsoft Research’s director of scalable and multi-core computing, Dan Reed.