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Wintel, Universities Team On Parallel Programming
kamlapati writes in with a followup from the news last month that Microsoft and Intel are funding a laboratory for research into parallel computing at UC Berkeley. The new development is the imminent delivery of the FPGA-based Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (BEE3) that will allow researchers to emulate systems with up to 1,000 cores in order to explore approaches to parallel programming. A Microsoft researcher called BEE3 "a Swiss Army knife of computer research tools."
It's a little disingenuous to claim that programmers are "stuck" with a serial programming model. The fact of the matter is that multi-threaded programming is a common paradigm which takes advantage of multiple cores just fine. Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.
Even languages like Erlang which bring parallelization right to the front of the language are still stuck running serial operations serially. There is sometimes no way around doing something sequentially.
Now, can we blow a few cycles on a few cores trying to predict which operations will get executed next? Yeah, sure, but that's not a programming problem, it's a hardware design problem.