Intel and Microsoft will invest $10 million over five years in a new research center at the University of Illinois to develop ways to take maximum advantage of today's multi-core computer chips.

The UI will invest another $8 million, mostly in "in-kind" services like staff and computing time, in the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, which will involve 22 UI researchers in computer science and engineering.

Intel and other chip makers have concentrated on speed increases as they worked to make processors like Intel's Pentium chips, kind of the brain of a computer, more powerful.

But limitations imposed by heat, power consumption and related factors as chips got faster shifted the focus in recent years to including more processing cores on each chip instead. The effect: two brains, or more, available to tackle tasks thrown at the computer at once, that is in "parallel" in computer science terms.

But computers, computer software in particular, still work sequentially for the most part, which negates the advantage of multiple cores. Problems just get run step by step anyway instead of being broken up and spread over the available cores – whether two or 100 – for processing simultaneously. Microsoft and Intel want the UI center, and another at the University of California, Berkeley, to come up with ideas to fix that.

"It's a fundamental problem," said Marc Snir, a UI computer science professor and parallel-computing expert who will co-direct the new center, announced today. "It's really, I would say, the top problem for (the information technology field) in the coming years."

The university was selected last fall to host what is supposed to be, at least to start, the world's faster super-computing cluster for science, a massive $200 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. That project focuses on parallel computing at the high end while the effort Intel and Microsoft are funding is aimed more at the consumer level, noted Charles Zukoski, the UI's vice chancellor for research.

"It makes us the center of the nation, if not the world, for parallel computing," Zukoski said.