Dr. Dobb's | BSC-Microsoft Research Center Launched

BSC-Microsoft Research Center Launched

Will focus on multi-core, parallelization, and transactional memory

January 18, 2008
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/bsc-microsoft-research-center-launched/205901014

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC) in the UK have announced the creation of the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre, which will focus on how CPUs and software for mobile and desktop markets will be designed and interact in the future.

The vision of the center is of a top-down computer architecture in which software requirements drive the hardware innovation forward, rather than letting the hardware design condition software development. In addition to fundamental and applied research in transactional memory, hardware support for managed runtimes will be conducted in the initial research projects.

"To optimize the designs and interactions of multi-core processors and software, we need to start from parallel programming. The way to deal with this multi-core architecture challenge is to bring together computer architects and programming language experts," said Mateo Valero, director of BSC.

The mission of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is to investigate, develop, and manage information technology to facilitate scientific progress. The multi-disciplinary center was established by a consortium made up by the Ministry of Education and Science (MEC), by the Government of Catalonia, and by the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC).