A veteran computer science researcher described plans for defining a new model for parallel programming at an annual gathering at UC Berkeley on February 21, according to a story in the EE Times. David Patterson, with Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division, said the opportunity to define a parallel programming model for mainstream computing was “an opportunity that comes only once in your career.”

Every startup that has tackled the problem over the last forty years has failed. Nevertheless, “The whole IT industry has bet its future on figuring out the problem of parallel programming, and I am still astonished about that,” he said.

Patterson was the keynote speaker at the UC Berkeley EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences) Annual Research Symposium (BEARS 2008). The full story can be found here.