WALL STREET JOURNAL reader Mike Magee says Microsoft and Intel are expected to announce a joint research project to engage in programming for multicore processors.

The research and development of the multicore programming project will purportedly be carried out by boffins from the University of California, Berkeley, where the Vole and Intel are funding a laboratory for research into parallel computing.

The lab would let researchers imitate 1000 core systems and could cost a cool $2 million a year for the next five years, the Journal learned today and the rest of us will learn later on.

The materialisation of processors with two or more cores has led to many calls for more research into bettering a device's processing ability using less power. The research hopes to lead the way in the scuttle to defining parallel programming models able to serve multicore computer processors which are already in the pipeline.

Multiple processing units have, in the past, proven to be a significant stumbling block to both hardware and software providers, because without optimal programming, applications don’t profit from added chip power, and in some cases can even become slower because of it.

The boffins will centre their research on attempting to set up development frameworks to facilitate dispersing computing jobs to be done in parallel by processors with multiple cores. They will also attempt to build parallel programs which use a more flexible set of standard modules, which would be dynamic enough to set up parallel tasks from the actual modules across available hardware in complex heterogeneous multi-core CPUs.

Intellivole will host a teleconference later today to confirm the Journal's story. µ

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