Microsoft`s Top Visionary Sees a Parallel World

SEATTLE (Reuters)- Craig Mundie, Microsoft Corp’s chief research and strategy officer,is sure he has a good handle on where technology is going. When isanother story.

Mundie, who took over as Microsoft’s lead visionary from co-founderBill Gates in 2006, is preparing the company for a technology shiftthat he expects will be as big as the rise of the personal computer orthe Internet: parallel computing.

"It’s a lot easier for us to have a fairly accurate sense of whatwill happen and even make good technical progress toward achieving it,"Mundie told Reuters in an interview last week. "Almost everything wetried to do took longer than we expected."

The overseer of Microsoft’s $7 billion research and developmentbudget, Mundie knows firsthand how even promising technologies can taketime to develop. After all, he has led Microsoft’s efforts in Web-basedtelevision and nontraditional forms of computing.

Parallel computing has been hyped for years as the next big thing intechnology, allowing computers to run faster by dividing up tasks overmultiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to performone task at a time.

The technology’s full potential is almost unfathomable today, but itcould lead to major advances in robotics or software applications thatcan translate documents in real time in multiple languages.

The computer industry has taken its first steps toward parallelcomputing in recent years by using "multi-core" chips, but Mundie saidthis is the "tip of the iceberg."

To maximize computing horsepower, software makers will need tochange how software programmers work. Only a handful of programmers inthe world know how to write software code to divide computing tasksinto chunks that can be processed at the same time instead of atraditional, linear, one-job-at-a-time approach.

A new programming language would be required, and could affect how almost every piece of software is written.

"This problem will be hard," admitted Mundie, who worked on parallelcomputing as the head of supercomputer company Alliant Computer Systemsbefore joining Microsoft. "This challenge looms large over the next 5to 10 years."

The shift to parallel computing was born out of necessity afterprocessor speeds ran into heat and power limitations, forcing thesemiconductor industry to assemble multiple cores, or electronicbrains, on a single chip.

Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc have already assembledchips with as many as four processors on a single chip. Tilera Corp, aSilicon Valley chip start-up, foresees a 1,000-core chip by 2014.

KILLER APPLICATIONS

Mundie, who assumed half of Gates’ job almost two years ago, setsthe long-term technological direction for the company as the co-foundermoves to a part-time role in July to focus on philanthropy. Ray Ozzie,chief software architect, sets the shorter-term agenda.

Mundie has at his disposal Microsoft’s research department with over 800 PhD researchers working on the new technology.

The research focuses on everything from Web search to simultaneoustranslation to touch-screen technology, but parallel computing iscertainly among its top priorities because it will likely affect everypart of Microsoft.

Computers about 100 times more powerful than now will emerge within20 years, Mundie estimated, packing the capabilities of a corporatedata center into a single die sitting inside a mobile phone or laptop.

A "killer application" will bring this computing power to theforefront, he said, just like what word processing and spreadsheets didfor the PC and how e-mail and the Web browser popularized the Internet.

Pushing a company as big as Microsoft — with about 80,000 employees– to look past historical strengths and traditional ways of doingthings to focus on new technology is not easy.

"Bill (Gates) and I have both talked at times over the years thatyou can’t do these jobs unless you are an optimist, almost an extremeoptimist because in a way you are fighting so many forces that areresistant to change," said Mundie.

(Additional reporting by Duncan Martell in San Francisco, editing by Richard Chang)