Intel, Microsoft to invest $10 million in new center
Intel and Microsoft corporations will invest $10 million over five years in a new research center at the UI to develop ways to take maximum advantage of today’s multi-core computer chips.
The UI will invest another $8 million – generally services such as staff and computing time – in the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, which will involve 22 UI researchers in computer science and engineering.
The center, announced last month, is a joint research endeavor of the department of computer science, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and corporate partners Microsoft and Intel, with faculty support from the department of electrical and computer engineering.
The center aims to enable commodity systems to make use of parallel computing techniques previously relegated to the realm of supercomputers. Researchers will aim to discover easy and accessible methods for enabling the multi-core computing systems increasingly in use today to take better advantage of their processing capabilities.
“Multi- and many-core computing is becoming pervasive; client-focused mass market applications are now driving parallel programming,” said Marc Snir, professor of computer science and co-director of the center. “We face a new challenge: one that places emphasis on productivity over high performance; and one that addresses the needs of the broad community of application developers. In such an environment, parallel programming must be accessible to all programmers.”
A central research thrust will be the development of applications to improve the quality of life for the end user, but are not feasible with the computing power available on today’s clients. For example, future systems should not only assist with computational tasks, but also enhance the ability to interact with each other and with the environment using natural communication and visual interfaces. The center’s research will be driven by and will eventually enable such applications.
“We believe that most parallel programmers should be able to use simple, intuitive ways of expressing parallelism,” said Wen-mei Hwu, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of the center. “Future microprocessors will contain hundreds, and perhaps thousands of cores. While parallel languages must become simpler, hardware is becoming more complex. We will be researching ways to bridge this enlarging gap to enable client-focused applications of the future.”
The center’s research activities are founded on the premise that advances in multi-core computing will require a coordinated, multi-disciplinary effort that encompasses all components of the multi-core system.
“We have new opportunities and challenges for parallel computing today,” said Sarita Adve, professor of computer science and director of research for the center. “The market is larger. This makes it possible to provide customized, and therefore simple, programming solutions for different applications. The challenge is that the hardware and system software must be sophisticated enough to efficiently support these solutions. Our multi-disciplinary approach will be critical to achieve this goal.”
The center at the UI is one of two funded by Microsoft and Intel. The other center will be at the University of California at Berkeley. This alliance is the first joint industry and university research center of this magnitude in the U.S. focused on mainstream parallel computing.
