Ed Sperling
Forbes

Uncle Sam has a new role as the sugar daddy of multiprocessing application development.

The National Science Foundation will spend $809 million this year on research in computer science, thanks in part to a $235 million bump from the federal stimulus package. Of that, an undisclosed portion will be spent on researching tools, programming methodologies and software development in the multicore world.

While the numbers are fuzzy, this still represents a significant shift in how this kind of research is funded. In the past almost all research was funded by computer hardware vendors, and they pretty much focused on the easier stuff. Databases, search, graphics rendering and scientific applications all can be broken into discrete processing chunks and then reassembled into a cohesive whole. The hard work is figuring out how to take advantage of many cores for other kinds of applications--or whether it's possible at all.

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