Researchers are gaining traction in their efforts to beat a path to programming tomorrow’s many-core microprocessors. In a Monday (August 24) session at the Hot Chips conference, three top labs will give what amounts to their first report cards on a task many have characterized as the most ambitious in the history of computer science.

Researchers at Berkeley, Illinois and Stanford have been at work for a little over a year with grants from Intel, Microsoft and a handful of other backers mainly from the PC industry. All three are forming ideas about the future of chips with dozens or hundreds of cores and coding prototype parallel software to harness them.

All sides see the need to rewrite today’s software stack, starting with performance-hungry applications then plugging in new languages and runtime environments and rewriting or scraping traditional operating systems. They are already beginning to develop and test early versions of their code.

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