Wednesday June 11th is Research@Intel Day 2008 - Intel's once a year invitation only press and educational community event designed to showcase the great ideas that the Corporate Technology Group and and other research groups are developing. We have been working on putting together the event for months and I've very excited to get out and show off some of our great work.

At Intel we have been wondering whether parallel programming features built into mainstream compiled languages such as C and C++ would speed up adoption of parallel programming. Parallel programs would make better usage of available hardware and enable more efficient solutions to day-to-day problems. The C++ language committee has been considering parallel programming extensions but they move slowly. As an experiment, we've introduced some simple extensions to C/C++ that allows asynchronous execution of any statement.

Last week I attended Intel's annual Software Enabling Summit in Anaheim. This is a worldwide gathering of Intel's software engineers charged with ensuring that the world's software takes best advantage of Intel processor and platform features.

(Sidebar: My wife thought it was really funny that we had a whole conference about "enabling", and suggested that I was now working with families and friends of those with addictions. No, not that kind of enabling, Deb.)

A few months ago, I was working with Aaron Tersteeg to make sure that we clearly summarized our involvement with the the Apache Harmony community. We got to talking about a few other projects that that I've been working on. Aaron told me about this "What If Alpha Software" concept that Intel was working to create.