Stanford Lab Tackles Parallel Computing
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 05/02/08
Stanford University
and a consortium of technology companies are announcing a joint effort to build a
Pervasive Parallelism Lab
. The initiative pools the efforts of many Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from
Sun Microsystems
,
Advanced Micro Devices
,
Nvidia
,
IBM
,
HP
, and
Intel
.
The announcement of the lab comes less than two months after the
University of California at Berkeley
and the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
each received multimillion-dollar grants from Microsoft and Intel to address the issue.
The Stanford center, with a budget of $6 million over three years, will research and develop a top-to-bottom parallel computing system, stretching from fundamental hardware to new user-friendly programming languages that will allow developers to exploit parallelism automatically.
Until recently, computers with large numbers of multiple processors were typically found in specialized environments such as supercomputing centers. As a consequence, few programmers have learned how to design software that exploits parallelism. The problem has caused serious concern among computer scientists that the progress of computing overall could stall.
"Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today and is the major obstacle to the continued scaling of computing performance that has fueled the computing industry, and several related industries, for the last 40 years," said Bill Dally, chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford.
Dally will participate in the lab's research, which will be directed by Kunle Olukotun, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Olukotun has worked for more than a decade on multicore computer architecture, in which many processors inhabit the same silicon chip.