In March, Microsoft’s External Research Team put out a request for proposal (RFP) for three-year research projects in multicore computing. On July 28, the opening day of its annual Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft announced how and where it will be spending its grant money.

Seven academic research projects will share the $1.5 million Microsoft allocated for the Safe and Scalable Multicore Computing RFP. According to Microsoft, this RFP is designed to “stimulate and enable bold, substantial research in multicore software that rethinks the relationships among computer architecture, operating systems, runtimes, compilers and applications.”

Microsoft, like many tech leaders, is investing substantial time and money of its own to try to help ease the transition to multicore/manycore computing with various parallel-processing advances. At this week’s Research Faculty Summit, Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform team is set to present on some of this work, including the Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework and Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ). Repre