This week, Microsoft and Intel announced that they have committed $20 million for parallel computing research at University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
Andrew Chien (Intel Research) in his blog post said "I can’t help but feel the excitement and optimism that accompanies the launching of a bold new venture which will involve nearly 90 talented researchers focused on parallel computing. We’ve got great partners in Microsoft, Berkeley, and Illinois, an exciting technical focus, and a commitment to create fundamental breakthroughs in parallel computing – applications, software, and hardware."
Below is my comment to the Andrew’s blog post (I hope it will appear soon).
For software development, wouldn’t using functional programming languages be a perfect fit with parallel and multi-core computing architectures?
Richard Gabriel discusses “The Design of Parallel Programming Languages” in his 1991 paper at http://www.dreamsongs.com/10ideas.html
Clifford Walinsky and Deb Banerjee also discuss “A functional programming language compiler for massively parallel computers”, cited at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=91556.91610
John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture titled, “Can Programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?”, summarizes “Only when these models and their applicative languages have proved their superiority over conventional languages will we have the economic basis to develop the new kind of computer that can best implement them. Only then, perhaps, will we be able to fully utilize large-scale integrated circuits in a computer design not limited by the von Neumann bottleneck.” The paper can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf
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