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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.
ParLab (what's being funded): http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/
RAMP (the people who are building the architectural simulators for ParLab): http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/
BEE2 (the precursor to the not-quite-so-microsoft BEE3): http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/
The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).
RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.
As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...