HotHardware.com posted details regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley

Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the Univerity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars over five years to fund two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC).

Intel and Microsoft Fund Multi-Threading Research