Office Standard 2010 Microsoft, Intel to team on n

In what has become a not-so-secret mystery, Microsoft and Intel are set to unveil on March eighteen their joint funding of a lot more parallel-processing analysis work,Microsoft Office 2007 Pro, based on numerous business reviews.
EETimes says the Wintel couple will announce it is assisting fund the new Parallel Computing Lab in the University of California at Berkeley. Though Microsoft officials aren't publicly confirming that report, the announcement tomorrow does involve Microsoft’s ongoing interest in multicore study, a company spokeswoman confirmed.
Update on March eighteen: The reviews were correct. Not only is UC Berkeley one of the participants inside new Parallel Computing Study Centers announced today by Microsoft and Intel, but so is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to the press release: “Microsoft and Intel have committed a combined $20 million to the Berkeley and UIUC study centers over the next five years. An further $8 million will come from UIUC,Windows 7 Activation, and UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million in funds from a state-supported program to match business grants.” Microsoft and Intel are billing this as the first joint industry-university collaboration “of this magnitude” that is focused on “mainstream” — not just scientific/high-end parallel-computing analysis.
Microsoft has a lot of its own study and commercial initiatives underway inside the multicore/parallel-processing arenas. The company released in late 2007 a test build of Parallel FX, which is a set of parallel extensions to Visual Studio. The Microsoft Analysis folks are working on the MS-ManiC (Memory Systems for A large number of Cores) project, which is focused on designing scalable memory-system architectures for many-core processors.
The Study team also has a request for proposal (RFP) out that will fund three-year study projects in multicore computing. The Safe and Scalable Multicore Computing RFP is for $1.5 million, which MSR anticipates making available in nine awards averageing $166,Office Enterprise 2007,000. Proposals for that RFP were due last week,Office Standard 2010, and recipients are st to become notified on April 23, 2008.
One of Microsoft’s parallel projects I’ve been following quite closely is Dryad, which is its distributed-computing infrastructure for large-scale (thousands of servers) parallel applications. Dryad is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s MapReduce technology. Dryad can scale from multicore single computers, to small clusters of computers, to data centers with thousands of computers, according to Microsoft.
On the Microsoft Investigation site, there’s a new analysis paper on Dryad which Microsoft’s researchers are set to present at the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) in Portugal next week.
Dryad is not pure analysis; Microsoft’s adCenter online advertising team is using the technology today. From the study paper:
“SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) [6] supports workflow-based application programming on a single instance of SQLServer. The AdCenter team in MSN has developed a system that embeds local SSIS computations in a larger, distributed graph with communication, scheduling and fault tolerance provided by Dryad.”
The Windows Live Search team seems to become making use of Dryad, too. Again, from the paper:
“We would like to thank all the members of the Cosmos team in Windows Live Search for their support and collaboration.”
(Cosmos, as I confirmed recently, is the distributed storage layer underlying Live Search.)
One far more update from March 18:  Microsoft’s Tony Hey, corporate vice president of External Research at Microsoft Study, itemized during a call with press and analysts about the new industry-research collaboration a few further multicore/parallel efforts Microsoft has undertaken. These include:
Parallel, scalable numerical libraries
Extending Microsoft’s Robotics Studio development kit for parallel environments
Parallel performance tools according to threads
Transaction Memory research (in Microsoft’s Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
Parallel programming languages  (primarily in Microsoft’s Cambridge,Office Pro Plus 2007, UK, lab)