The new research agenda was motivated in part by an increasing sense that the industry is in a crisis of a sort because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge quickly. Most programmers today still write programs that solve problems in a serial fashion.

Currently, the most advanced consumer-oriented microprocessors have up to eight processors, or cores, on a chip, but the industry is moving toward chips with 100 or more. The problem, according to academic researchers and industry executives, is that the software to keep dozens of processors busy simultaneously for all kinds of computing problems does not exist.

A great deal of industry discussion has focused on centralised, or “cloud,” computing. But the new research laboratories will instead seek breakthroughs in mobile computing systems. The new systems will be designed to perform tasks that today’s computers have trouble accomplishing, like recognising human gestures and speech. An advanced parallel computing system will also help scientists create Web browsers that can more quickly pull in complex data, process it and display it.

The two research teams were chosen from applications from 25 universities in the United States. Both Intel and Microsoft said the research funds were a partial step toward filling a void left by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

“The academic community has never really recovered from Darpa’s withdrawal,” said Daniel A Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft, who will help oversee the new research labs.