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Microsoft and Intel say they're putting up a combined $20 million over the next five years to fund "parallel computing" research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In basic terms, they're hoping to figure out how to make software run more effectively across multiple computer processors at the same time. The companies say the effort reflects the industry's shift toward systems with multiple cores, providing more than one engine for processing software. The announcement this morning added new details to the reports that have leaked out over the past few days.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, has identified parallel computing as a big long-term focus for the company. In a conference call today, Tony Hey of Microsoft Research gave several hypothetical applications to explain the potential the company sees in parallel computing. Among them: An intelligent digital assistant that sifts incoming e-mails and calls and determines priorities after learning how the user likes to interact with people; a personal health-care assistant that monitors diet, exercise, and vital signs, and alerts the user when it's time to go to the doctor or take medicine; and speech recognition software that could tell who's speaking on a conference call.

During the Q&A portion of the conference call, I raised what can sometimes be a touchy question: Who will have rights to technology produced by the research? Under the arrangement, Intel and Microsoft will have non-exclusive, royalty-free rights to any patents filed on research coming out of the center, Hey said. They'll also have the right to negotiate exclusive licenses based on the research. Apart from those situations, Hey said, the software produced in the centers will be made available under open-source licenses.

David Patterson, the veteran computer science professor who will lead the UC Berkeley center, downplayed the significance of patents in the process. Patents are "not what I see as one of the critical pieces for the success of technology transfer" from university to industry, Patterson said. He continued:

"If it was, for example, the Google search patent that Stanford has, people would be paying them billions of dollars, and nobody pays them that. It's basically too easy to get around an IT patent, and university IT patents just typically aren't all that exciting. I think the important thing is what we really will do is do papers, and those we get to publish without restriction. And of course, software, which is through this open-source license, we're going to use the BSD license. I think that's going to really make it possible to have (an) impact with what we're doing and that's one of the reasons we're excited about working on it."

See related items on the Berkeley and Illinois sites.