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Intel, Microsoft Collaborate with Universities on Parallel Computing Initiative
3/18/2008
"No one's building the 15 GHz processor right now that can compete with a parallel processor," he said. "So programmers have no choice. If they want to write fast programs, they're going to have to write parallel programs. That's never been an obstacle. That's always been what I call the lazy-boy approach to programming: 'Why rewrite my program to be parallel? I'll just sit here and wait for Intel ... to make my programs faster without me doing anything.' Well, that era's over. So programmers are going to have to do something new if they want to run faster. That's one of the reasons I think why this time we have a better shot at revolutionizing programming around parallelism."
He added: "If we do this, I think we'll be able to set the foundation of computing for the next 30 or 40 years. For me--and I think for all the researchers--I think this is a once-in-a-career opportunity to set the foundation that people will be able to take advantage of for decades. If we solve this, the future of performance is rosy. And if we don't, it's not rosy."
A 'Wake Up Call'
Microsoft's Hey acknowledged that the age of parallel computing is upon us and said that this is a wake-up call for the industry and for academia.
"We're aware that the sea change is going to be on us," he said, "and we have been pursuing--within Microsoft Research, within other parts of the company--research into parallel programming. We have been looking into that. But we do think there needs to be a wake-up call to both the funding agencies and to academia that this really is an important for the computer science community and the IT industry to focus on. And that's why we think it's a very significant time to invest in two major centers at Berkeley and Illinois."
"This really is a change in how the whole industry is going to scale and deliver performance going forward, and that change represents ... a challenge, but it also represents an opportunity," said Intel's Andrew Chien, vice president, Corporate Technology Group and director, Intel Research. "The companies that are successfully advocating this transition to parallelism will probably be the leaders of the IT industry 10 or 15 years from today. The challenge for Intel, the challenge I'll speak to, is really to create the best opportunities for people to build applications that deliver compelling value on our parallel platforms...."
Who Benefits from the Research?
Research conducted through the centers will generally be made available openly. But Microsoft and Intel have certain options for negotiating exclusivity to exploit the technologies.
Said Microsoft's Hey, "Intel and Microsoft have non-exclusive, royalty-free access to patents filed on research supported by the centers. And we also have a right to negotiate an exclusive license based on this research, if that's deemed appropriate. But otherwise, the software that we will be producing in the centers we anticipate will be made freely available under Illinois and Berkeley open source licenses and be a benefit to the whole of the IT industry and to the whole of academia. So we have a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to intellectual property with an option to negotiate an exclusive [one], but otherwise we'll make the software available to everybody."
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