Microsoft, Intel, Two Schools Join Forces
Computing giants Intel and Microsoft will invest $10 million in a new research center at the University of Illinois to develop ways to take maximum advantage of today’s multicore computer chips.
The UI will invest another $8 million, mostly in "in-kind" services like staff and computing time, in the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, which will involve 22 UI researchers in computer science and engineering.
Intel and other chip makers have traditionally concentrated on speed increases to make processing chips like Intel’s Pentium, kind of the brain of a computer, more powerful.
But limitations imposed by heat, power consumption and related factors as chips got faster shifted the focus in recent years to including more processing cores on each chip instead. The effect: two brains, or more, available to tackle tasks thrown at the computer at once, that is in "parallel" in computer science terms.
"On my laptop I have two cores on my chip and probably I can start buying four (soon)," said Marc Snir, a UI computer science professor and parallel-computing expert who will co-direct the new center. "It (the number of cores) keeps growing."
But computers, computer software in particular, still work sequentially for the most part, which limits the advantage of multiple cores. Problems just get run step by step anyway instead of being broken up and spread over the available cores whether two or 100 for processing simultaneously. Microsoft and Intel want the UI center, and another at the University of California, Berkeley, to come up with ideas to fix that.
The UI and Berkeley were among two dozen "top tier" schools that pitched proposals to the companies.
Snir will co-direct the center here with computer and electrical engineering professor Wen-mei Hwu. Computer science Professor Sarita Adve will be the center’s research director.
The alliance between the two companies and the schools is the first joint industry and university research center of this magnitude in the U.S. focused on mainstream parallel computing, according to a press release.
"It’s a fundamental problem," Snir said. "It’s really, I would say, the top problem for (the information technology field) in the coming years." The UI researchers will focus on several areas ranging from new applications for multicore processors and chip architecture to new programming languages and environments.
"Now you need software that is running in parallel," Snir said. "It requires a totally new way of developing software." And of doing so relatively easily, he added, if the industry is going to get on board.
"There are challenges," said Snir, a former head of the UI Computer Science Department.
There also are opportunities from the perspective of the UI. The university was selected last fall to host what is supposed to be, at least to start, the world’s faster super-computing cluster for science, a massive $200 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. That project focuses on parallel computing at the high end while the effort Intel and Microsoft are funding is aimed more at the consumer level, noted Charles Zukoski, the UI’s vice chancellor for research.
Zukoski said he thinks Intel and Microsoft were attracted by the quality and the scale of computing research at the UI and likewise Berkeley, another large public university, as well as by an opportunity to get an inside track on hiring the UI’s students.
"We are excited about working with the University of Illinois because its stellar faculty and students are global leaders in creating breakthroughs in parallel software and architecture," Andrew Chien, vice president of the Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel Research, said in a press release.