Researchers have taken several small steps on a long and complex journey toward creating new parallel programming models to harness tomorrow’s many-core processors. The work entails crafting an entirely new set of architectures ranging from parallel applications and data structures to the processors that will run them.

That was the picture that emerged from more than a dozen presentations from the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). The group, funded by a five-year $10 million grant from Intel and Microsoft, concluded a two-day summit Friday (March 19) at the University of Illinois.

The summit was essentially an interim update on a work plan the two-year-old center sketched out in a white paper released in November 2008. The update showed researchers have largely kept to their master plan, are tightly engaged with their Wintel sponsors and still have a long way to go.

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