Written by Gizmo
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Tuesday, 04 August 2009 10:28 |
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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